Roger Scruton

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Roger Scruton

Sir Roger Vernon Scruton FBA FRSL (born February 27, 1944 in Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire , † January 12, 2020 ) was a British writer and philosopher .

life and work

Scruton studied philosophy at Jesus College at the University of Cambridge ( BA , 1965 and MA , 1967) and received his doctorate there in 1972 with a thesis on aesthetics . He taught at Birkbeck College from 1971 to 1992 . From 1992 to 1995 he was a professor at Boston University , from 2005 to 2009 at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia.

Scruton has authored more than 60 books; many of them were translated into the German language.

Roger Scruton died in January 2020 at the age of 75 from complications from cancer.

Act

Roger Scruton was considered an influential conservative intellectual in the Edmund Burke tradition ; because of his rejection of interventionist foreign policy and certain reservations about the free market, he was sometimes referred to as a paleoconservative .

In the 1970s and 1980s he traveled extensively to the Eastern Bloc, especially to Czechoslovakia and Poland, and lectured to dissidents there. The magazine he edited, The Salisbury Review , was read in the Czech Republic by civil rights activists such as Vaclav Havel . Havel later also wrote for the magazine. After Scruton's death, Poland's President Andrzej Duda paid tribute to Scruton as a “great friend of the Polish people”.

In April 2019, the British government dismissed him from his position as advisor on questions of building culture after making statements in an interview with the weekly newspaper New Statesman , some of which were communicated in advance by a journalist on Twitter and criticized as anti-Semitic and Islamophobic had been. He was reassigned to his advisory role in July 2019 after the New Statesman publicly apologized to Scruton for the distortion and misrepresentation of his statements. The British government also officially expressed regrets about the previous dismissal. The FAZ London correspondent , Gina Thomas, referred to Scruton's support for “dissidents in the totalitarian Eastern bloc” in the 1980s and commented that now he himself is “in the free world the victim of thought policemen who suppress civilized discourse because they can not tolerate dissenting opinions ”.

On the occasion of his death, the historian Timothy Garton Ash recognized him as "a man of extraordinary intellect, knowledge and humor" who was a great supporter of Eastern European dissidents and exactly the kind of "provocative conservative thinker" for which a truly open society should be grateful . The EU MP and journalist Daniel Hannan described Scruton as the "greatest conservative of our time". The Times wrote in a two-page obituary that Scruton was "one of the most avowed and provocative Conservative thinkers of his generation and, for that reason, one of the least influential within the Conservative Party."

honors and awards

Fonts

  • The Classical Vernacular: architectural principles in an age of nihilism (1995)
  • Animal Rights and Wrongs (1996, third edn. 2000)
  • An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy (1996)
  • The Aesthetics of Music (1997)
  • On Hunting (1998)
  • An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998, new edn. 2000)
  • Spinoza (1998)
  • Perictione in Colophon (2000)
  • England: an Elegy (2001)
  • The West and the Rest (2002)
  • Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (2004)
  • News from Somewhere: On Settling (2004)
  • Gentle Regrets (2005)
  • A Political Philosophy (2006)
  • Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (2007)
  • Beauty (2009)
  • How to be a conservative (2014)
  • Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015)
  • The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung (2016)
  • Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (2018)
  • On Human Nature (2019)

literature

  • Dorschel, Andreas. A promise of happiness. Recent philosophical studies on the beautiful . Philosophische Rundschau LVIII, 3, 2011, pp. 226–247 [= review of Beauty (2009)]
  • Special Issue: Roger Scruton's Aesthetics . British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (2009), No. 4 (with contributions by Kathleen Stock, Dawn Phillips and others)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sir Roger Scruton dead: Former Tory adviser dies at 75 after cancer battle
  2. ↑ Uwe Justus Wenzel: Roger Scruton preaches the love for home, hearth and home | NZZ . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . September 5, 2012, ISSN  0376-6829 ( nzz.ch [accessed August 25, 2018]).
  3. ↑ Jonathan Rée: Green Philosophy by Roger Scruton - review. December 28, 2011, accessed August 25, 2018 .
  4. ^ British conservative philosopher, friend of Poland dies - president. Retrieved January 13, 2020 .
  5. ^ Matthew Weaver, Peter Walker: Government sacks Roger Scruton after remarks about Soros and Islamophobia . In: The Guardian . April 10, 2019, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed September 17, 2019]).
  6. ↑ The New Statesman apologises to Roger Scruton The Spectator , July 8, 2019
  7. ↑ Ben Quinn: Roger Scruton gets government job back after 'regrettable' sacking. In: The Guardian. July 23, 2019, accessed on September 17, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Sir Roger Scruton: Govt 'sorry' for sacking adviser over New Statesman interview Skynews.com, July 16, 2019
  9. ↑ Gina Thomas: Champagne from the bottle. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Retrieved January 14, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Roger Scruton: Conservative thinker dies at 75 BBC.co.uk, January 12, 2020, accessed January 13, 2020
  11. ^ The Times: Sir Roger Scruton (Obituary), Jan 13, 2020, pp. 48-49
  12. ^ Professor Roger Scruton awarded knighthood , Jesus College, June 13, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Scruton, Roger
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Scruton, Roger Vernon (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH February 27, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire , United Kingdom UK
DATE OF DEATH January 12, 2020