Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 "Mark loves overboard," Shawn Rosenheim, a professor of English at Williams, says of his colleague Mark Taylor. The distinguishing feature of Taylor's career is a fearless, or perhaps reckless, orientation to the new and to whatever challenges orthodoxy. He calls himself a philosopher of culture, but such is his restlessness that it's not easy to say what Taylor is a scholar of; he has done influential work on Hegel and Kierkegaard, on post-death-of-God theology, on architecture theory and the postmodern aesthetic. In the 80's, Taylor became one of the leading exponents in this country of the work of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who popularized the term "deconstruction" and whose work is widely taken as some sort of elaborate joke inside most American philosophy departments, including the one at Williams. Taylor no longer describes himself as a Derridean, but you can still read Derrida's influence in Taylor's love of the ambiguous and the incongruous and his scorn for the idea that philosophy can proceed from universally accepted axioms. Taylor's work is playful, perverse, rarefied, ingenious and often brilliant. He is fascinated by surfaces, and he rejects the distinction between surface and depth. "Hides hide hide," as he writes puckishly in a 1997 book titled "Hiding," which includes a chapter on fashion that is interrupted by what purport to be articles from fashion magazines, though in fact they are sendups created by our artful author. Taylor's experimental bent led him to work with emerging technology. In 1992 he used teleconferencing to teach a "global seminar" with a colleague in Helsinki. The two published their e-mails as a book titled "Imagologies: Media Philosophy." For a class on Las Vegas, which Taylor saw as the node of American popular culture, he developed a video game on CD-ROM, complete with glittery jewel box; using a video representation of a slot machine, students explored Las Vegas as a prism for understanding virtual culture. Taylor was interested in anything that moved away from or subverted the linearity and abstractness of the conventional classroom. In the mid-90's the Internet, and the idea of a network society, became increasingly central to his work. He developed a media lab in which students in one of his classes prepared multimedia hypertexts, and he taught an Internet class for Williams alumni. In 1995, Taylor established the Center for Arts and the Humanities on the Williams campus in order to explore the new technology.