Roger Scruton who has died of lung cancer aged 75, was a philosopher and a controversial public intellectual. Active in the fields of aesthetics, art, music, political philosophy and architecture, both inside and outside the academic world, he dedicated himself to nurturing beauty, “re-enchanting the world” and giving intellectual rigour to conservatism.
He wrote more than 50 books, including perceptive works on Spinoza, Kant, Wittgenstein and the history of philosophy, and four novels, as well as columns on wine, hunting and current affairs, and was a talented pianist and composer.
A member of the traditionalist-conservative Salisbury Group, he helped found the Salisbury Review, which he edited from 1982 to 2001. This quarterly, which was circulated in the Soviet bloc, often in samizdat form, was criticised in Britain for having retrograde attitudes. In 1984 it defended Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headteacher who had disputed the value of multicultural education. Consequent hostility from colleagues prompted Scruton to abandon in 1992 his professorship in aesthetics at what is now Birkbeck, University of London, where he had started as a lecturer in 1971. Though he felt this had scuppered his academic career, in the event it freed him for activities and adventures on a wider stage.
A Alma do Mundo pdf by Roger Scruton
A experiência do sagrado contra o ataque dos ateísmos contemporâneos. Do autor de Como ser um conservador O renomado filósofo Roger Scruton argumenta que nossos relacionamentos pessoais, intuições morais e julgamentos estéticos implicam na existência de uma dimensão transcendental que não pode ser completamente compreendida pelo olhar da ciência. Em vez de apresentar uma defesa da existência de Deus, ou da verdade da religião, o que o autor propõe neste livro é uma reflexão sobre por que o sentimento do sagrado é essencial à vida humana, e o que a perda dele pode significar. Ao analisar arte, arquitetura, música e literatura, Scruton sugere que as formas mais puras da experiência e da expressão humana contam a história da nossa necessidade do sagrado, e que esta busca dá ao mundo uma alma. A alma do mundo conclui, portanto, que, mesmo com o papel cada vez menor do sagrado no mundo contemporâneo, os caminhos à transcendência permanecem abertos.