From Kant to Las Vegas to Cyberspace: a Philosopher on the Edge of Postmodernism By Scott Heller The Chronicle of Higher Education May 29, 1998 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. A scholar's great fear, says Mark C. Taylor, is running out of ideas before running out of time. What could be worse than rehashing the same small theory again and again, watching your audience grow smaller with every publication? And the classroom is no refuge. The intro course you teach stays on the books for years, especially at a small institution like Williams College, where Mr. Taylor is a professor of humanities. Your students leave. They become chief executives at places like America Online. You remain a fixture on that post card of a campus, lunching at the faculty club, making sure to remember every student's name. But you have no graduate students to carry on your work. A very restless mind has kept Mr. Taylor from falling into the trap of the long-time professor at a liberal-arts college. Though he arrived at Williams in 1973, a 27-year-old with a fresh Ph.D. in religion from Harvard University, his intellectual pursuits have taken him far and wide, from religion to deconstruction to art and architecture. Photographs of himself taken with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida flank one window in his home office, an old barn refitted for reading and reflection. A bolt of fabric hanging from the rafters was designed by the Finnish firm Marimekko, and is based on designs included in a book of media theory that Mr. Taylor wrote with one of Finland's most famous scholars. Thanks to a long-time friendship with the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Mr. Taylor was at the recent opening of the foundation's new museum, in Bilbao, Spain. For the catalogue of a forthcoming show on motorcycles at the Guggenheim in New York, he has written an essay on the religious impulse behind high-speed biking. "I live in multiple worlds," he says.