Thinkers' paradise?: Philosophers converge on LV, and setting arouses debate

They don't look like gamblers and yet it's not clear why. Could be the professorial elbow patches on assorted wool sports coats, the frayed notebooks, the pensive brows.

They seem happy to be here; happy but troubled with the notion of happiness. Happy but wholly unsure about the rightness or wrongness of happiness; tangled in a web of inscrutable musings about the reality of happiness; conflicted about the reality and fakery of Las Vegas, about the rightness and wrongness of its architecture, its economy, its growth.

But they are here nevertheless -- 180 philosophers -- gathered in the wings of the Tropicana hotel, amidst the incessant chanting of "Wheel of Fortune" slot machines, for the 28th annual meeting of the Society of the Advancement of American Philosophy.

They have come here to think.

While a hotel filled with jolly Midwesterners jams quarters into machines, the philosophers sit on lavender chairs in the Caribbean conference room to wrangle over the "ethics-vs.-epistemology split" and one or more "semiotic theories of theology."

This is the first time the Society has met in Las Vegas -- last year, it was in Southern Illinois at -- of all places -- a university. This year some of the 800 members boycotted the meeting because they objected to the objectification of women in Las Vegas, but others are so titillated with the venue they're already whispering about next year's Field Trip to the Strip.

Accordingly, a favored topic of discussion is the city itself, which the philosophers with elbow patches and pensive brows call "a parody of itself."

"A lot of people think this is the quintessential American city," Paul Schollmeier, chairman of UNLV's Philosophy Department and conference host, said on Monday. "It's been a topic for discussion for a long time, but it's becoming more center stage now."

In academic circles, apparently, there is a growing theory that the world is going to end up like Las Vegas, for better and more tantalizingly, for worse.

"You cannot understand the world today if you do not understand Las Vegas," keynote speaker Mark C. Taylor, Williams College philosopher and author, said in his speech Monday morning.

But understanding this city -- really understanding it -- appears to be a bit more challenging for those in the meeting hall than for those hooting at their luck on the craps tables nearby.

Taylor's theory of the significance of Las Vegas starts with Immanuel Kant, is guided by the philosophy of Andy Warhol and somehow involves the Russian revolution, quasi-Hegelian spirituality, Friedrich Nietzsche's "God is dead" theory, architect Frank O. Gehry, Karl Marx and Steve Wynn.

Standing behind a podium using a slide projector for the occasional visual aid -- a photo of Warhol's soup cans, a photo of the Guggenheim Museum -- Taylor said -- or seems to have said -- that Las Vegas is the crossroads between high art and low art. It is a place in fact where the boundary between what is art and what is not art collapses, a place where people consume for the art of consuming, where money and art unite, where facade becomes reality, where everything exists for its own self-reflection.

"It is the collapse of the transcendent into a radical kind of immanence," Taylor said. "A virtual reality."

After his speech, other thinkers in the lavender room stood, scratched their chins and politely engaged in exclusionary discourse about the collapse of the wall between the culturati and the Average Joe.

American philosophers are the "more practical" of the world's philosophers, according to Society Secretary Kenneth Stikkers, a professor at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. "We are out of our ivory towers. The role of philosophers is to bring us back to concreteness.

"Many would say, if there's an issue with Vegas, let's experience it firsthand. Let's see it."

The group arrived Sunday and will depart today.

On Sunday night, at a private reception where clusters of philosophers stood drinking Corona from the bottle and listening to a cellist perform, a steady stream of thinkers disappeared through the doors to the jingling casino.

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