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 DeLillo (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.
In philosophy, deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances.
Postmodernism is a term used to refer to a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. They have in common the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of representing reality. Still, there is disagreement among experts about its more precise meaning even within narrow contexts.
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his 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 distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".
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 Christian theology in light of postmodernism and various forms of post-Heideggerian thought, including post-structuralism, phenomenology, 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".
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 postmodern architectural movement 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.
Ontotheology means the ontology of God and/or the theology of being. While the term was first used by Immanuel Kant, it has only come into broader philosophical parlance with the significance it took for Martin Heidegger's later thought. While, for Heidegger, the term is used to critique the whole tradition of 'Western metaphysics', much recent scholarship has sought to question whether 'ontotheology' developed at a certain point in the metaphysical tradition, with many seeking to equate the development of 'ontotheological' thinking with the development of modernity, and Duns Scotus often being cited as the first 'ontotheologian'.
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 Kenneth Alexander 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.
Memory work is a process of engaging with the past which has both an ethical and historical dimension. During memory work, the process of producing an image or what we refer to as the production of the imaginary, is central. Therefore, the key in the analysis of remembered history are contradictions. This calls for an expanded archive that includes the "oral and popular tradition" as well as the written traditions normally associated with the archives.
Terry Smith is an Australian art historian, art critic and artist who currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, New York and Sydney.
Roberto Rino Magliola is an Italian-American academic specializing in European hermeneutics and deconstruction, comparative philosophy, and inter-religious dialogue. He is retired from the National Taiwan University and Assumption University of Thailand.
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 Dean of Social Sciences, Professor of Religion and Science and Technological Studies. She has also been an affiliated member of the departments of Philosophy, 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. Her book, Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse, served the inspiration material for the Oscar-winning 2022 American film, Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Marius Timmann Mjaaland is a Norwegian philosopher. He is known for his work on environmental philosophy, ethics, phenomenology, philosophy of religion, and systematic theology. He is professor at the University of Oslo.
