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Roger Scruton
Sign in to saveAlso known as Roger Vernon Scruton, Professor Sir Roger Vernon Scruton
English conservative philosopher and writer (1944–2020)
Roger Scruton was an English conservative philosopher and writer who developed influential ideas about aesthetics, culture, and political philosophy from a right-wing perspective. His work matters because he became a major intellectual voice in modern conservatism, shaping debates about beauty, tradition, and society that continue to influence political and cultural discussions today.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Person · Open Library
- Born
- 1944
- Died
- 2020
- Works
- 222
Top works
- Building and composing
- De betekenis van het conservatisme
- ʻAlei ʻasor navel
- Our Church
- Como ser um conservador
via Open Library + Wikidata
Music · MusicBrainz
- Type
- Person
- Gender
- Male
- Origin
- United Kingdom
- Active from
- 1936-03-22
- Active to
- 2023-09-13
Discography
via MusicBrainz · CC0
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 228
- Total plays
- 1,075
Roger Vernon Scruton (27 February 1944 - 12 January 2020) was an English philosopher who specialised in aesthetics. He wrote over 30 books, including Art and Imagination (1974), Sexual Desire (1986), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006), Beauty (2009), Our Church (2012) and The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought. Scruton also wrote a number of general textbooks on philosophy and culture, two novels, and composed two operas. <a
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews
· 2021 · cited 85,169x
- Comparison of simple potential functions for simulating liquid water
· 1983 · cited 39,574x
- An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust
· 1995 · cited 28,261x
- Radiotherapy plus Concomitant and Adjuvant Temozolomide for Glioblastoma
· 2005 · cited 18,736x
- Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome
· 2001 · cited 18,622x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “Yes, I am in favor of censorship, but it has to be conducted by people like me. And that's the difficulty (laughs). I'm in favor of encouraging every possible form of self-restraint and parental control. And I certainly don't think that pornography should be protected under the American Constitution.”
- “The modern world gives proof at every point that it is far easier to destroy institutions than to create them. Nevertheless, few people seem to understand this truth.”
- “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't.”
- “Kant's position is extremely subtle — so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.”
- “In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.”
- “There is no doubt in my mind that, from the third-person point of view, monarchy is the most reasonable form of government. By embodying the state in a fragile human person, it captures the arbitrariness and the givenness of political allegiance, and so transforms allegiance into affection.”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
~40 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Sir Roger Vernon Scruton (/ˈskruːtən/; 27 February 1944 – 12 January 2020) was an English philosopher, writer, and social critic who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of conservative views. The founding-editor of The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, Scruton wrote over 50 books on architecture, art, philosophy, politics, religion, among other topics. Scruton was also Chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission for the United Kingdom's government, from 2019 to 2020. His views on classical architecture and beauty are still promoted via his foundation, while his political stances remain influential.
His publications include The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Sexual Desire (1986), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), and How to Be a Conservative (2014). He was a regular contributor to the popular media, including The Times, The Spectator, and the New Statesman. Scruton explained that he embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France. From 1971 to 1992 he was lecturer, reader, and then Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, after which he was Professor of Philosophy at Boston University until 1995. From then on, he worked as a freelance writer and scholar, though he later held several part-time or temporary academic positions, including in the United States. In the 1980s he helped to establish underground academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, for which he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First Class) by President Václav Havel in 1998. Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Roger Scruton” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.