We often served as panelists or speakers together, and when Roger briefly re-entered academic employment, for short periods we were academic colleagues-first in Virginia and later in St Andrews (which he came to dub affectionately as “Stan Drews”). ![]() We became battle-wearied comrades in the common enterprise of philosophizing publicly in defense of traditional positions on education, the family, marriage, and society. Through the years our friendship continued and deepened. ![]() Developing and applying this approach became the substance and method of much of Roger’s writings on aesthetics, from The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979) and The Aesthetic Understanding (1983) to The Aesthetics of Music (1997) and Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (2004). Yet “look at it like this” or “listen to it in this way” are common in contexts in which we try to reason someone into appreciating something. This is a common feature of experience but one then neglected by philosophers. He once described sessions with Anscombe as consisting largely of periods of unbroken silence-from which he said he nonetheless learned much.Īrt and Imagination explores the interweaving of imagination, thought, and perception involved in coming to see something in a certain way, under this or that description or aspect. From Anscombe he learned little directly relevant to his specific research (aesthetics wasn’t one of her interests), but through her he came to appreciate the insights of her teacher Wittgenstein about the nature of thought and experience, and the value and importance of depth over cleverness. From the latter, he learned that art and literary criticism could be rigorous and reasoned. Roger was a leader in a new generation of philosophers who tried to change all that.Īt Cambridge, Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Tanner supervised his PhD. It also fed off a meager diet of stereotypical examples at once overused and under-studied. Apart from the question of whether it is possible to give strict definitions in such a diverse field, this approach tended to separate aesthetics from other parts of philosophy. Philosophers of art and beauty were preoccupied with classifying and defining certain terms: “art,” “aesthetic experience,” “aesthetic qualities,” and so on. Herein lies a lesson: Philosophers who hope to engage and inspire an educated and cultured public, as did Scruton and Williams, would do well to cultivate aesthetic sensibilities.īefore Roger came on the scene in 1974 with Art and Imagination, philosophical aesthetics was a marginal and rather dreary academic backwater. Though they differed greatly on politics, Scruton and Dummett deeply appreciated the cultural value of religious practice and liturgy. They were also great opera aficionados-they loved Wagner especially. In fact, however, he and Williams had much in common as philosophers.īoth had tremendous powers of comprehension, imagination, and insight, a common appreciation of the complexities of human thought and feeling, and a shared resistance to the instrumentalization and “scientization” of university study and scholarship. Michael Dummett and Bernard Williams were leading members of the tribe that Roger taunted (sometimes needlessly), and this led to a long delay in his merited election to the Fellowship of the British Academy. He was not one of my teachers, but I learned a good deal from listening to him in various settings-including reading parties at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park.Įventually Roger left the academy to give himself wholly to writing, public lecturing, broadcasting, and afflicting the comfortable in the prevailing liberal-socialist establishment. I first got to know Roger forty years ago at London University’s Birkbeck College, where he was lecturing in philosophy and I was studying it. We have lost a truly great figure, but his writings remain to nourish, encourage, and educate those who value the humane conversation of mankind and the wisdom philosophy can bring to it. Roger was one of a kind: poetic, courageous, and funny. ![]() The death of Sir Roger Scruton has deprived academic aesthetics of one of its most creative, insightful, and wide-ranging practitioners.
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