A review of Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, by Stephen R.C. Hicks “Explaining” What is postmodernism? We hear the word all the time, but unless we really make a study of it, it’s just a word to describe a way of thinking that somehow follows modernism. Of course, “modernism” is itself […]
Read more...Tag: Scruton
Top-Soil
More Roger Scruton. Here’s an excerpt from Modern Philosophy, in which Scruton is talking of the sterile landscape left by scientistic reductionism: The meaning of the world is enshrined in conceptions that science does not endorse: conceptions like beauty, goodness and the soul which grow in the thin top-soil of human discourse. This top-soil is […]
Read more...Modern Philosophy
A review of Modern Philosophy (Penguin 1994) by Roger Scruton. This book is, as subtitled, “an introduction and survey,” but there is also an underlying thesis in Scruton’s arrangement of subjects. By “modern philosophy” he means not merely recent developments in philosophy, but an emphasis on philosophers since Descartes who are “modernists” – committed to […]
Read more...Being and Time
Roger Scruton is a great contemporary philosopher. You should run out and read everything he ever wrote. His specialty is aesthetics, but he is versatile. I read him in part for his handle on developments in philosophy over the last few hundred years, including especially the influence of Friedrich Hegel, the preeminent late-18th century philosopher. On the key philosophical subject of […]
Read more...