Work
Taylor's first book,Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship:A Study of Time and the Self was published by Princeton University Press in 1975. This was followed in 1980 by the work for which Taylor received his Doctorate,Journeys to Selfhood:Hegel and Kierkegaard (University of California Press;reissued by Fordham University Press in 2000). Taylor's early study of Kierkegaard and Hegel forms the foundation for all his subsequent work.
In the early 1980s,Taylor began exploring the texts of Jacques Derrida and his most important followers. Erring:A Postmodern A/Theology (University of Chicago Press,1984) was one of the earliest attempts to study religion from the standpoint of poststructuralist philosophy and was followed by two closely related works,the sourcebook Deconstruction in Context:Literature and Philosophy (Chicago,1986) and Altarity (Chicago,1987). In 1989,Taylor founded the Religion and Postmodernism series at the University of Chicago Press as a forum for translations and new scholarship.
During the late 1980s,Taylor was drawn into debates about architecture and the visual arts,and in 1992 published a theological study of religious twentieth-century visual arts,Disfiguring:Art,Architecture and Religion. In later essays and books,Taylor considers a broad range of artists:Mark Tansey,Michael Heizer,Richard Serra,Fred Sandback,Ann Hamilton,Joseph Beuys and others. His extensive work on architecture includes essays on Peter Eisenman,Bernard Tschumi,Daniel Liebeskind,Robert Venturi,Frank Gehry,and Frank Lloyd Wright.
While writing on the visual arts,Taylor became interested in media and new information technologies. In 1992 he and Esa Saarinen,a Finnish philosopher,taught the first global seminar using teleconferencing technology. Their book,Imagologies:Media Philosophy (Routledge,1994) grew out of this seminar. The book's unusual design in turn inspired the Finnish design company,Marimekko,to develop a product line derived from pages of the book. Taylor's subsequent book,Hiding (Chicago,1997),extended the use of graphic design to create hypertextual effects within the limits of a conventional bound book. As a companion to Hiding,Taylor and JoséMarquez issued a CD-ROM video game entitled The Réal –Las Vegas,Nevada.
While Taylor was exploring art and new media,he extended his experiments with technology in the classroom. In 1993,he was awarded the Rector's Medal by the University of Helsinki and in 1995 the Carnegie Foundation named him the national Professor of the Year for his innovative teaching. In 1998,Taylor and New York investment banker Herbert Allen,Jr.,founded Global Education Network,whose mission was to provide high-quality,low-cost online education in the liberal arts,humanities,and sciences.
Taylor's work with technology led to a growing interest in the expanding fields of network theory and scientific studies of complex adaptive systems. In a series of books--The Picture in Question:Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (Chicago,1999),The Moment of Complexity (Chicago,2001),and Confidence Games:Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago,2004)--Taylor deploys complexity theory to explore a range of social,cultural and economic developments.
Taylor's interest in the visual arts and graphic design has led to his own artistic experiments. In Grave Matters (Reaktion,2002),Taylor and Dietrich Christian Lammerts collaborated on a book featuring Lammerts's photographs of the graves of one hundred and fifty modern writers,theologians,philosophers,artists and architects. In 2003,Taylor expanded this project beyond the format of the book to create an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art,which included not only the photographs but also sculpture and video art. In 2006,Taylor published Mystic Bones,featuring forty of Taylor's own photographs of deer,cattle and elk bones,accompanied by aphorisms and an essay,"Rubbings of Reality," on the place of deserts in the imagination. More recently,Taylor has been creating a complex work of art entitled "NeXus," which includes land art,and stone,bone,and steel sculptures. In the summer of 2016 he co-curated an exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown,MA entitled "Sensing Place:Reflections on Stone Hill." NeXus was part of this exhibition. His book Recovering Place:Reflections on Stone Hill (Columbia University Press,2014) was the catalog for this show.
Taylor's work attempts to give sustained attention to the theological,cultural,and artistic issues that were framed in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Taylor's After God,published in the fall of 2007 (University of Chicago Press),weaves together the many strands of his oeuvre.
Taylor's additional books include:Refiguring the Real:In Conversation with William Gaddis,Richard Powers,Mark Danielewski,and Don Dillo (Columbia University Press,2013),Refiguring the Spiritual:Beuys,Barney,Turrell,Goldsworthy (Columbia University Press,2012),Speed Limits:Where Time Went And Why We Have So Little Left (Yale,2014),Last Works:Lessons in Leaving (Yale,2018),and Abiding Grace:Time,Modernity,Death (University of Chicago Press,2018) On August 31,2010,Taylor published Crisis on Campus:A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, ISBN 0-307-59329-0), in which he identified and analyzed major problems facing higher education. [1] [2]
In addition to his own writing, Taylor has been involved in a number of editorial projects. In the late 1970s, he chaired the Research and Publications Committee of the American Academy of Religion, which initiated a series of major publishing programs. The Religion and Postmodernism book series he founded continues at the University of Chicago Press under the editorship of Thomas A. Carlson. Taylor has also edited a textbook, Critical Terms for the Study of Religion (Chicago, 1998), designed for college courses on method in religious studies.
The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who defined it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which take precedence over appearances, instead considering the constantly changing complex function of language, making static and idealist ideas of it inadequate. Deconstruction instead places emphasis on the mere appearance of language in both speech and writing, or suggests at least that essence as it is called is to be found in its appearance, while it itself is "undecidable", and everyday experiences cannot be empirically evaluated to find the actuality of language.
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism, rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and emphasis on ideology as a means of maintaining political power. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.
Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in numerous texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he has distanced himself from post-structuralism and "protest[ed] against the word postmodernity".
Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, is a form of theological thinking and religious practice which attempts to approach God, the Divine, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God. It forms a pair together with cataphatic theology, which approaches God or the Divine by affirmations or positive statements about what God is.
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as epistemology and communication, the human body, modern art and postmodern art, literature and critical theory, music, film, time and memory, space, the city and landscape, the sublime, and the relation between aesthetics and politics. He is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. Lyotard was a key personality in contemporary Continental philosophy and author of 26 books and many articles. He was a director of the International College of Philosophy founded by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt.
John David Caputo is an American philosopher who is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University. Caputo is a major figure associated with postmodern Christianity and continental philosophy of religion, as well as the founder of the theological movement known as weak theology. Much of Caputo's work focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, deconstruction and theology.
Postmodern theology, also known as the continental philosophy of religion, is a philosophical and theological movement that interprets theology in light of post-Heideggerian continental philosophy, including phenomenology, post-structuralism, and deconstruction.
James Herman Olthuis is an interdisciplinary scholar in ethics, hermeneutics, philosophical theology, as well as a theorist and practitioner of psychotherapy of a kind he calls "relational psychotherapy".
In modern usage, the term grammatology refers to the scientific study of writing systems or scripts. This usage was first elucidated in English by linguist Ignace Gelb in his 1952 book A Study of Writing. The equivalent word is recorded in German and French use long before then. Grammatology can examine the typology of scripts, the analysis of the structural properties of scripts, and the relationship between written and spoken language. In its broadest sense, some scholars also include the study of literacy in grammatology and, indeed, the impact of writing on philosophy, religion, science, administration and other aspects of the organization of society. Historian Bruce Trigger associates grammatology with cultural evolution.
Kevin Jon Vanhoozer is an American theologian and current Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) in Deerfield, Illinois. Much of Vanhoozer's work focuses on systematic theology, hermeneutics, and postmodernism.
Deconstructivism is a movement of postmodern architecture which appeared in the 1980s. It gives the impression of the fragmentation of the constructed building, commonly characterised by an absence of obvious harmony, continuity, or symmetry. Its name is a portmanteau of Constructivism and "Deconstruction", a form of semiotic analysis developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Architects whose work is often described as deconstructivist include Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, and Coop Himmelb(l)au.
Charles Edwin Winquist was the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, and is known for his writings on theology, contemporary continental philosophy and postmodern religion. Before he assumed his position at Syracuse University, he taught religious studies at California State University, Chico, from 1969 to 1986.
James K. A. Smith is a Canadian-American philosopher who is currently Professor of Philosophy at Calvin University, holding the Gary & Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology & Worldview. He is the current editor-in-chief of the literary journal Image.
Roberto Rino Magliola is an Italian-American academic specializing in European hermeneutics and deconstruction, in comparative philosophy, and in inter-religious dialogue. He is retired from National Taiwan University and from Assumption University of Thailand.
Robert P. Scharlemann was a radical theologian best known for his theological works on the being of God and as an interpreter of Paul Tillich. Scharlemann taught at the University of Iowa and the University of Virginia.
The following is a bibliography of John D. Caputo's works. Caputo is an American philosopher closely associated with postmodern Christianity.
Mark Dooley is an Irish philosopher, writer and newspaper columnist. A specialist in continental philosophy, theology and the philosophy of religion, he is the author of several books, including The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard's Ethics of Responsibility (2001), Roger Scruton: The Philosopher of Dover Beach (2009), and Why Be a Catholic? (2011).
William Franke is an American academic and philosopher, professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. A main exposition of his philosophical thinking is A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014), a book which dwells on the limits of language in order to open thought to the inconceivable. On this basis, the discourses of myth, mysticism, metaphysics, and the arts take on new and previously unsuspected types of meaning. This book is the object of a Syndicate Forum and of a collective volume of essays by diverse hands in the series “Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion”: Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy. Franke's apophatic philosophy is based on his two-volume On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (2007), which reconstructs in the margins of philosophy a counter-tradition to the thought and culture of the Logos. Franke extends this philosophy in an intercultural direction, entering the field of comparative philosophy, with Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders. In On the Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking, Franke argues for application of apophatic thinking in a variety of fields and across disciplines, from humanities to cognitive science, as key to reaching peaceful mutual understanding in a multicultural world riven by racial and gender conflict, religious antagonisms, and national and regional rivalries.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein is a scholar of religion, philosophy, science studies, and gender studies. At Wesleyan University, she is Professor of Religion and Science in Society. She is also affiliated with Environmental Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. From 2014 to 2019, she was co-chair of the Philosophy of Religion Unit of the American Academy of Religion. She is a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion.
