From Kant to Las Vegas to Cyberspace: a Philosopher on the Edge of Postmodernism 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 'IT'S NOT TECHNOPHILIA' Later he defends the experimental course, which, among other things, he argues, will give students useful technological skills. "It's not technophilia -- it's realism," he says, noting that undergraduates come to Williams already immersed in the non-linear thinking demanded by video games and the World-Wide Web. "As a teacher of young people, I want to be able to communicate the sense of creative possibility," he adds. "I don't want the last line I offer to be, 'Life's a bitch.'" He remains close to a network of current and former students who have gone on to work in academic fields and, lately, in high-tech industries. They include Jose Marquez, with whom he put together the CD-ROM "The Real, Las Vegas NV." It's a game in which the rules aren't clear. The setting is a deserted motel. To move from room to room, the user clicks on a coin and plays a virtual slot machine. The moves are random, but cumulatively the experience is meant to construct, you might say, a philosophy of Las Vegas. Derrida is featured in one room, magnates and financiers in others. Mr. Taylor himself is pictured in Room 51, dressed in a janitor's outfit. "To go from Kant and Hegel to Las Vegas and cyberspace looks like a stretch," he says, "but there's a logic to it." Las Vegas, he contends, is a place where image is everything, where lights and mirrors reflect endlessly in a dazzle of surfaces. Yet where else, he asks, is loss so much a part of the fabric of everyday life? Las Vegas, that is, needs to be understood as a religious experience. "He's not interested in religion in an obvious or an overt sense," says Mr. Thomas, of the Chicago press. "He'd argue you can only approach its vestiges in the material culture around us." "It looks like he's moving away from more classic theological materials," says Maria Antonaccio, who studied with Mr. Taylor at Williams and is now an assistant professor of religion at Bucknell University. "But I see a consistency. He's always asking, 'What does this have to do with how we live, with questions of meaning and lack of meaning?'" Reviewers of his recent books are not so sure. Elizabeth Hand, in The Washington Post, called Hiding "an exhilarating descent into the centrifuge of postmodern thought," but warned that the insistent playfulness of the text and design left her "headachey." Hillel Schwartz, in The New York Times, wondered whether Mr. Taylor was being too eclectic and too obscure for his own good. His advocates say Mr. Taylor has brought philosophical heft to the discussion of art, architecture, and virtual culture. Quite often, those advocates are artists and architects themselves.