Background
Taylor, Mark Cooper was born on December 13, 1945 in Plainfield, New Jersey, United States. Son of Noel Alexander and Thelma Kathryn (Cooper) Taylor.
( We live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era...)
We live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change and information can move faster than our ability to comprehend them. With The Moment of Complexity, Mark C. Taylor offers a map for the unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy for our time through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226791181/?tag=2022091-20
( Disfiguring is the first sustained interpretation of th...)
Disfiguring is the first sustained interpretation of the deep but often hidden links among twentieth-century art, architecture, and religion. While many of the greatest modern painters and architects have insisted on the spiritual significance of their work, historians of modern art and architecture have largely avoided questions of religion. Likewise, contemporary philosophers and theologians have, for the most part, ignored visual arts. Taylor presents a carefully structured and subtly nuanced analysis of the religious presuppositions that inform recent artistic theory and practice--and, in doing so, recasts the cultural landscape of our era.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226791327/?tag=2022091-20
(Este relato autobiográfico cuenta el inolvidable viaje in...)
Este relato autobiográfico cuenta el inolvidable viaje invertido que hizo Mark C. Taylor de la muerte a la vida. Narra su experiencia de lucha diaria contra la enfermedad y la convalecencia, y lo hace con humor y esperanza. El libro es una profunda exploración de la fragilidad humana y, a la vez, de la resiliencia. Cuando n
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/8415723431/?tag=2022091-20
( The desert has long been a theme in Mark C. Taylor’s wo...)
The desert has long been a theme in Mark C. Taylor’s work, from his inquiries into the religious significance of Las Vegas to his writings on earthworks artist Michael Heizer. At once haunted by absence and loss, the desert, for Taylor, is a place of exile and wandering, of temptation and tribulation. Bones, in turn, speak to his abiding interest in remnants, ruins, ritual, and immanence. Taylor combines his fascination in the detritus of the desert and its philosophical significance with his work in photography in Mystic Bones. A collection of remarkably elegant close-up images of weathered bones—remains of cattle, elk, and deer skeletons gathered from the desert of the American West—Mystic Bones pairs each photograph with a philosophical aphorism. These images are buttressed by a major essay, “Rubbings of Reality,” in which Taylor explores the use of bones in the religious rituals of native inhabitants of the Western desert and, more broadly, the appearance of bones in myth and religious reality. Meditating on the way in which bones paradoxically embody both the personal and the impersonal—at one time they are our very substance, but eventually they become our last remnants, anonymous, memorializing oblivion—Taylor here suggests ways in which natural processes can be thought of as art, and bones as art objects. Bones, Taylor writes, “draw us elsewhere.” To follow their traces beyond the edge of the human is to wander into ageless times and open spaces where everything familiar becomes strange. By revealing beauty hidden in the most unexpected places, these haunting images refigure death in a way that allows life to be seen anew. A bold new work from a respected philosopher of religion, Mystic Bones is Taylor’s his most personal statement of after-God theology.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226790371/?tag=2022091-20
(Taylor (humanities and religion, Williams College, Massac...)
Taylor (humanities and religion, Williams College, Massachusetts) reconsiders the two philosophers based on the notion that all modern philosophy lies between the poles of their thought. He has added a new introduction to the 1980 original edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0823220583/?tag=2022091-20
( "Religion," Mark C. Taylor maintains, "is most interest...)
"Religion," Mark C. Taylor maintains, "is most interesting where it is least obvious." From global financial networks to the casinos of Las Vegas, from images flickering on computer terminals to steel sculpture, material culture bears unexpected traces of the divine. In a world where the economies of faith are obscure, yet pervasive, Taylor shows that approaching religion directly is less instructive than thinking about it. Traveling from high culture to pop culture and back again, About Religion approaches cyberspace and Las Vegas through Hegel and Kant and reads Melville's The Confidence-Man through the film Wall Street. As astonishing juxtapositions and associations proliferate, formerly uncharted territories of virtual culture disclose theological vestiges, showing that faith in contemporary culture is as unavoidable as it is elusive. The most accessible presentation of Taylor's revolutionary ideas to date, About Religion gives us a dazzling and disturbing vision of life at the end of the old and beginning of the new millennium.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226791629/?tag=2022091-20
( Readers familiar with Mark C. Taylor's previous writing...)
Readers familiar with Mark C. Taylor's previous writing will immediately recognize Altarity as a remarkable synthetic project. This work combines the analytic depth and detail of Taylor's earlier studies of Kierkegaard and Hegel with the philosophical and theological scope of his highly acclaimed Erring. In Altarity, Taylor develops a genealogy of otherness and difference that is based on the principle of creative juxtaposition. Rather than relying on a historical or chronological survey of crucial moments in modern philosophical thinking, he explores the complex question of difference through the strategies of contrast, resonance, and design. Taylor brings together the work of thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, Kristeva, Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida, and Kierkegaard to fashion a broad intellectual scheme. Situated in an interdisciplinary discourse, Altarity signifies a harnessing of continental and American habits of intellectual thought and illustrates the singularity that emerges from such a configuration. As such, the book functions as a mirror of our intellectual moment and offers the academy a rigorous way of acknowledging the limitations of its own interpretive practices.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226791386/?tag=2022091-20
( In the fall of 2005, Mark C. Taylor, the controversial ...)
In the fall of 2005, Mark C. Taylor, the controversial public intellectual and widely respected scholar, suddenly fell critically ill. For two days a team of forty doctors, many of whom thought he would not live, fought to save him. Taylor would eventually recover, but only to face a new threat: surgery for cancer. "These experiences have changed me in ways I am still struggling to understand," Taylor writes in this absorbing memoir. "After the past year, I am persuaded that I have done enough fieldwork to write a book that combines philosophical and theological reflection with autobiographical narrative. Writing is not only possible but actually seems necessary." Field Notes from Elsewhere is Taylor's unforgettable, inverted journey from death to life. Each of his memoir's fifty-two chapters and accompanying photographs recounts a morning-to-evening experience with sickness and convalescence, mingling humor and hope with a deep exploration of human frailty and, conversely, resilience. When we confront the end of life, Taylor explains, the axis of the lived world shifts, and everything must be reevaluated. As Taylor sorts through his remembrances, much that once seemed familiar becomes strange, paradoxical, and contradictory. He reads his experience with and against ghosts from his past, recasting the meaning of mortality, sacrifice, solitude, and abandonment, along with a host of other issues, in light of modern ways of dying. "You never come back from elsewhere," Taylor concludes, "because elsewhere always comes back with you."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231147805/?tag=2022091-20
( Awash in a sea of data that seems to have no meaning an...)
Awash in a sea of data that seems to have no meaning and bombarded by images and sounds transmitted from around the globe 24/7, people are no longer sure what is real and what is fake. Artists recycle ads in their paintings and businesses use images of artists in their ads; politicians mount campaigns based on hit films; and bankers make billions trading incomprehensible financial products backed by nothing more than abstract figures and signs. In Confidence Games, Mark C. Taylor considers the implications of these developments for our digital and increasingly virtual economy. According to Taylor, money and markets do not exist in a vacuum but grow in a profoundly cultural medium, reflecting and in turn shaping their world. To understand the recent changes in our economy, it is not enough to analyze the impact of politics and technology—one must consider the influence of art, philosophy, and religion as well. Bringing John Calvin, G. W. F. Hegel, and Adam Smith to Wall Street by way of Las Vegas, Taylor first explores the historical and psychological origins of money, the importance of religious beliefs and practices for the emergence of markets, and the unexpected role of religion and art in the classical understanding of economics. He then moves to an account of economic developments during the past four decades, exploring the dawn of our new information age, the growing virtuality of money and markets, and the complexity of the networks by which monetary value is now negotiated. Returning full circle to a version of the market first proposed by Adam Smith when he used theology and aesthetics to rethink economics, Confidence Games closes with a plea for a conception of life that embraces uncertainty and insecurity as signs of the openness of the future. Like religion and economics, life is a confidence game in which the challenge is not to find redemption but to learn to live without it. "Before the global credit system began its collapse in 2007, Mark Taylor had connected the dots between increasingly complex financial instruments and larger cultural forces. Anyone who wants to understand the disappearing foundation of our financial markets needs to read this book immediately."—Michael Lewitt, editor, The HCM Market Letter “Beyond simply dealing with ‘money and markets,’ Confidence Games is a fascinating and wide-ranging tour of modern and postmodern ideas and conditions from Aristotle to Nietzsche, from Wall Street to Las Vegas.”—Craig Bay, Journal of Markets & Morality
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226791688/?tag=2022091-20
( "The Moment of Complexity is a profoundly original work...)
"The Moment of Complexity is a profoundly original work. In remarkable and insightful ways, Mark Taylor traces an entirely new way to view the evolution of our culture, detailing how information theory and the scientific concept of complexity can be used to understand recent developments in the arts and humanities. This book will ultimately be seen as a classic."-John L. Casti, Santa Fe Institute, author of Gödel: A Life of Logic, the Mind, and Mathematics The science of complexity accounts for that inscrutable mix of chaos and order that governs our natural world. Complexity explains how networks emerge and function, how species organize into ecosystems, how stars form into galaxies, and how just a few sequences of DNA can account for so many different life forms. Recently, the idea of complexity has taken the worlds of business and politics by storm. The concept is used to account for phenomena as varied as the behavior of the stock market, the response of voting populations, and the effects of risk management. Even Disney has used complexity theory to manage crowd control at its theme parks. Given the startling development of new information technologies, we now live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it. With The Moment of Complexity, Mark C. Taylor offers a timely map for this unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept, but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic. Drawing on resources from information theory and evolutionary biology, Taylor explains the operation of complex adaptive systems in social and cultural processes and captures a whole new zeitgeist in the making. To appreciate the significance of our emerging network culture, he claims, we need not only to understand contemporary scientific and technological transformations, but also to explore the subtle influences of art, architecture, philosophy, religion, and higher education. The Moment of Complexity, then, is a remarkable work of cultural analysis on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how we arrived at this critical moment in our culture, and to know where we might head in the twenty-first century.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226791173/?tag=2022091-20
Taylor, Mark Cooper was born on December 13, 1945 in Plainfield, New Jersey, United States. Son of Noel Alexander and Thelma Kathryn (Cooper) Taylor.
Bachelor, Wesleyan University, 1968. Doctor of Philosophy in Religion, Harvard University. Doktorgrad in Religion, University Copenhagen, 1981.
Instructor religion Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972-1973. Professor religion Williams College, Williamstown, 1973—1986, William R. Kenan, Junior professor religion, 1986—2007, director Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, 1987-1989, Cluett professor humanities. Professor religion, chair Department Religion Columbia University, New York City, since 2007.
Co-founder Global Education Network, 1998.
(Taylor (humanities and religion, Williams College, Massac...)
(Taylor (humanities and religion, Williams College, Massac...)
( Awash in a sea of data that seems to have no meaning an...)
( Disfiguring is the first sustained interpretation of th...)
( We live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era...)
(Este relato autobiográfico cuenta el inolvidable viaje in...)
(Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy{Pape...)
( "The Moment of Complexity is a profoundly original work...)
( The desert has long been a theme in Mark C. Taylor’s wo...)
( Readers familiar with Mark C. Taylor's previous writing...)
( In the fall of 2005, Mark C. Taylor, the controversial ...)
( "Religion," Mark C. Taylor maintains, "is most interest...)
(religion)
Member of Society for Values in Higher Education, Hegel Society of America, American Academy Religion (chairman research and publications committee 1979-1982).
Married Mary-Dinnis Stearns, June 22, 1968. Children— Aaron Stearns, Kirsten Jennie.