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Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey

Tekijä: Roger Scruton

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539644,508 (3.93)4
Roger Scruton is one of the most widely respected philosophers of our time, whose often provocative views never fail to stimulate debate. In Modern Philosophy he turns his attention to the whole of the field, from the philosophy of logic to aesthetics, and in so doing provides us with an essential and comprehensive guide to modern thinking. Considered by many to be the best philosophical primer since Bertrand Russell's THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY, this book is a must for both the student and the general reader.… (lisätietoja)
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I seem to be starting new books much faster than I finish ones I've been reading. 'Tis a disease. The house is full of books with bookmarks halfway through. Anyhoo, I have bookmarks in at least four of Scruton's books and I like him so much I might just finish one.
  garbagedump | Dec 9, 2022 |
12/2/21
  laplantelibrary | Dec 5, 2021 |
A human is a creature made in the image of God, distinguished from other creatures in having mind (memory), emotions (love), and will (decisiveness) versus simple instinct and habit. See Roger Scruton’s Modern Philosophy p. 299. “It is clear, from the discussions in the last few chapters, that rationality is a critical concept for the understanding of human beings. It is not easy to define rationality, however; nor is it clear that rationality is the distinguishing feature of the kind to which we belong, more important than any other feature that might serve to distinguish us…” (Jim Berg: who cares what is the difference between the soul and the spirit!”) There are human beings without reason, and reason may be manifest in things that are not human—in angels and gods, maybe in other animals, maybe in machines programmed to match our human powers.
Nevertheless, Aristotle’s hunch—that we are essentially rational—has been shared by many later thinkers, including Aquinas and Kant. (We are referring here to de re rather than de dicto necessity: see Chapter 13). It provides us with the only conceivable ground, short of religious revelation, for our treatment of human beings as separate from the rest of the animal kingdom. Aristotle’s hunch is this: we are distinguished from the lower animals by our mental life. If we survey this mental life, and enumerate all the ways in which it transcends the capacity of apes, dogs and bears, we find that these many ways are in fact one way, and reveal different facets of a single ontological divide: between reasoning and non-reasoning beings. Here are some distinctions:
(a) Animals have desires, but they do not make choices.

(397-8, beginning of chapter 27 Paradox) Paradox means a proposition which is ‘contrary to belief’, and paradoxes are of two kinds: those that defy some familiar orthodoxy (usually without sufficient explanation); and those that begin from intuitively acceptable premises and derive from them a contradiction—something that cannot be true. It is the second kind of paradox that has been most interesting to modern philosophers, since it provides a kind of objective test of the cogency of a philosophical system: a contradiction is a reductio ad absurdum of the ideas that produce it.
Or is it so simple? What if reality itself is paradoxical? In that case, surely, we might have more sympathy for a philosophy that recorded the paradox, than for one that resolved it. This was Kant’s hope, in developing his philosophy of freedom. All rational beings could be brought to see, he believed, both that they really are free, and that the postulate of freedom is, from the point of view of the intellect, inherently paradoxical. Others, in more mystical vein, have shown a willingness to embrace paradox in every sphere, as a sign of human limitations, and of our need for divine guidance and revelation.
Paradox has therefore had a history in Western thought that is not accurately recorded by its place in modern philosophy. Although the pre-Socratics studied paradoxes of time, space and motion, and regarded the desire to resolve them as the prime motive of metaphysics, paradox achieved its true sovereignty with the birth of the Christian religion. Christian doctrine consciously embraces paradox—the Incarnation of God, and His Crucifixion. Already in the epistles of St Paul you find these paradoxes presented in all their raw untenability as a test of faith. (The gospel is ‘folly to the Gentiles, and to the Jews a stumbling block’.) The Church Father Tertullian wrote credo quia absurdum est—I believe because it is absurd, referring explicitly to the Crucifixion. Far from regarding this as a refutation of the Christian religion, his successors acknowledged in this utterance the true principle of religious belief.
Maybe all religions have their store of precious paradox. But paradox is not the same as mystery. It sets out to thrill and also to undermine. It is a destabilizing force, and also a strange invitation to commitment. There is something in the human psyche which, faced with an unbelievable proposition, rushes forward to embrace it, to say ’yes, it must be so!’, and to rejoice in the ruin of common sense that follows. A paradox may therefore be an act of defiance, in which the world of ordinary things is set at a distance and ridiculed.
Paradox has therefore had an important place, not only in religious thinking, but also in revolutionary politics. Rousseau, in the Social Contract, defiantly tells us that we must be ‘forced to be free’; while his disciples, Robespierre and St Just, advocated a ‘despotism of liberty’ as they laughingly chopped off the heads of those who had shown themselves incapable of enjoying it. Such paradoxes abound in the literature of revolution: ‘property is theft’; ‘right is a bourgeois invention, so it is right to resist it’; ‘repressive tolerance’; ‘human will is the effect but not the cause of history; so make history!’

(b) Animals have consciousness but no self-consciousness.
(c) Animals have beliefs and desires; but their beliefs and desires concern present objects: perceived dangers, immediate needs, and so on.
(d) Animals relate to one another, but not as persons.
(e) In general, animals do not have rights and duties.
(f) Animals lack imagination: they can think about the actual, and be anxious as to what the actual implies.
(g) Animals lack the aesthetic sense: they enjoy the world, but not as an object of disinterested contemplation.
(h) In all sorts of ways, the passions of animals are circumscribed—they feel no indignation, but only rage; they feel no remorse, but only fear of the whip; they feel neither erotic love nor true sexual desire, but only a mute attachment and a need for coupling.
(i) Animals are humorless—no hyena has ever laughed—and unmusical—no bird has ever sung.
(j) Underlying all those, and many other, ways in which the animals fail to match our mental repertoire, there is the thing which, according to some philosophers, explains them all: namely the fact that animals lack speech, and are therefore deprived of all those thoughts, feelings and attitudes which depend upon speech for their expression.

Subjective Spirit pp 451-452 Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Conversation is a fleeting thing; but what I have said applies even more evidently to those long-term relations of love and friendship which are among the highest of human goods. Aristotle distinguished three kinds of friendship. There is the friendship founded in pleasure, as when children play together, men drink together, or women gossip. Such friendships show the primitive form of mutuality: they are valued for their own sake, but they are fleeting, and the companion can easily be replaced by another who will ‘do just as well’. They contrast with friendships of utility: as in a business partnership, or a joint operation for a common goal. Here friendship is subordinate to a purpose, and may dissolve when the purpose is frustrated or fulfilled. Aristotle’s third form of friendship is friendship as we should normally conceive it: in which the other is valued for his own sake [friendship as an end], regardless of the pleasure or utility that we derive from him. Aristotle believed that such a friendship is possible only between virtuous people. That may not be true; nevertheless, we can recognize human commerce: there are relationships which are valued for their own sake, and those which are valued as a means. And among those valued for their own sake there is a lower, less formed, more infantile variety, and a higher, more conscious and more lasting kind, in which the other person is not just enjoyed [friendship founded in pleasure, first kind of friendship] but also valued.
Friendship brings us into the kingdom of ends, though it is a warmer and livelier realm than the one described by Kant. In friendship everything is an end, nothing a means only. I strive to please you; I do things for your sake, and not for any interest of mine (except my ‘interest of reason’ which is to do things for another’s sake). The friendship itself is my purpose, and I treat you not as a means to that purpose but as the end of it. In friendship the quest of reason for the why of things comes to a final end: and the end is you.
Friendship has a function: it binds people together, making communities strong and durable; it brings advantages to those who are joined by it, and fortifies them in all their endeavors. But make those advantages into your purpose, and the friendship is gone. Friendship is a means to advantage, but only when not treated as a means. The same is true of almost everything worthwhile: education, sport, hiking, hunting, and art itself.
Those are difficult thoughts to unravel: but it is not absurd to believe that, if we could unravel them, we should have a clue to the meaning of life. Meaning lies in intrinsic value; we understand it by discovering the thing that interests us for its own sake; and such an interest must be disinterested, in the manner of aesthetic experience, friendship, and every other activity where we are not ‘merely in earnest’.
Nor is it only in the realm of subjective spirit [world of the soul?] that these activities are important. Oakeshott has argued that the greatest mistake in political thinking is to envisage the polis on the model of an ‘enterprise association’—a partnership for some common purpose. Yet that is how we view the state, whenever we subordinate the natural growth of peaceful congregation to some overmastering plan. ‘Civil association’ is to be compared less with an enterprise than with a conversation. (Aristotle, for similar reasons, described it [the state] as a species of friendship, in the wide sense encapsulated in the Greek philia.) Many have found inspiration in Oakeshott’s idea: others have criticized it for ignoring Hegel’s distinction between civil society and state. However, whether political organization is to be seen as end or as means, it will never answer to our deepest needs, if it makes no room for associations that are ends in themselves [non sequitor].

The Commons
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Roger Scruton: Philosopher of the “Small World”
Johan Wennström | Nov 25, 2020 | Community

In a discussion with the journalist Toby Young on the Quillette podcast earlier this year, the Conservative politician Daniel Hannan suggested that the influence of the late philosopher Sir Roger Scruton (1944–2020) “is only going to grow with each passing year.” Yet the sum of Scruton’s legacy may not only be that he affected the way we think. Rather, and perhaps more importantly, it may be that through his work and personal example he inspires a change in how we live. Indeed, Scruton was a philosopher of everyday life. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, his ideas might gain new ground.

It is difficult to give a comprehensive description of Scruton’s philosophy. He never published an all-encompassing manifesto. But that would hardly have been expected of someone who resisted Big Ideas, and who admired Friedrich Hayek’s insight that knowledge cannot be concentrated in a central authority. Instead, and much more in line with his own conservative convictions, Scruton produced a vast body of work with an eclectic and even eccentric range of themes. Nevertheless, there is a common thread running through many of Scruton’s books, and this is his occupation with questions about how we should find meaning in what the Swedish sociologist Hans Zetterberg called the “small world” divorced from the impersonal “large world” of politics and markets.

For exploring the Scrutonian view on these matters, the question of what to drink is a useful starting point. “In his embrace of the pleasures which life offers,” the Spectator columnist Bruce Anderson wrote in his tribute to Scruton, “Roger was, of course, an oenophile [a connoisseur of wines].” Yet there was philosophy behind his connoisseurship. Wine, properly drunk, as Scruton explained in his book I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine (2009), “is not simply a shot of alcohol”; it has important social functions, such as teaching people the virtue of temperance and making them recognize the inhibiting value of rituals. In fact, for Scruton, wine is not just a drink, but also a place—an expression of the soil in which the grapes were grown and of distinctly local cultural traditions. Wine allows us to “travel in the glass” and visit distant locales without having to leave our own.

This insight grows directly from the central term of Scruton’s philosophy of everyday life: “settlement.” Scruton was often critical of nomadic tourism. In his book Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet (2012), he argued that we should instead turn toward home and rediscover “the local, the rooted, and the characterful” as opposed to the “global, the uprooted, and the bland.” We should develop feelings of affection, responsibility, and stewardship for the place where we are, and thus contribute to a “local warming.” According to Scruton, such a rekindling of territorial loyalty would both save the planet from environmental degradation from the bottom up and accord with what he described as man’s “home-ish” nature.

The point is not to preserve our place as a kind of museum, but rather to renew it to pass it on as a living inheritance to future generations—to counter oikophobia [oikophobia is an aversion to a home environment, or an abnormal fear of one's home]. In practice, this means engaging in the local community, tending to social bonds, promoting those aesthetic values on which the establishment and endurance of a shared environment depend, and actively seeking out old and half-forgotten customs.

Scruton was hardly an armchair philosopher in this respect. On the contrary, his ideas seem to have evolved, at least in large part, from his own experience. After having led a somewhat unmoored urban existence for many years, he decided in the early 1990s to settle in rural Wiltshire. There, he took up fox hunting and in other ways immersed himself in local life. With his wife, Sophie, whom he met hunting one day, he began a small farming venture. Linking himself to his immediate surroundings, and helping keep rural traditions alive, appear to have brought him deep contentment. It was only half-jokingly that he referred to the farm where he lived with his family as “Scrutopia.”

Scruton shares the personal story of his own change in On Hunting (1998) and News from Somewhere: On Settling (2004), where he also offers his views about many specific features of the “small world,” such as child-rearing, food, and marriage. His thoughts on these subjects are interesting and worthy of consideration in themselves, but it is his concept of settlement that might help us shape how we live our everyday lives in the new world we may be entering.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues, we may see long-lasting changes in travel and labor. Tourist flights to all corners of the globe, which are already widely criticized as environmentally hazardous, might come to be seen as unsafe and unnecessary. As more firms learn to use new communication technologies that allow employees to be dispersed, office work could also be abandoned in many professions. We could be moving, by necessity, in a more national and local direction.

Scruton’s ideas offer a way of making the best of this social transformation. They can help us to look at our own places with a renewed sense of appreciation, as sources of pride, identity, and cohesion. As work can be done ever more from home, people might be encouraged to leave dense megacities and find a new and more grounded way of living in neglected rural areas—helping to revitalize them by linking themselves to the local, as Scruton did himself. If we still feel a longing for the outside world, we can always open a bottle of wine and travel in the glass.

Return to the Commons
Johan Wennström, PhD (Political Science), works at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm. @johanwennstrom
  keithhamblen | Sep 13, 2020 |
Modern Philosophy is an attempt by Roger Scruton to demonstrate the problems that modern philosophers tackle. It isn’t really focused on any one section of philosophy, rather it has 31 different concepts and ideas, and what our modern philosophy makes of each different concept. It is a really long book, but in that sense, it works as an introduction to each concept rather than something that delves deep into a subject matter. There are some schools of thought or thinkers that Scruton lavishes praise on, while others are skipped over entirely.

I thought it was interesting that Scruton talks extensively about Plato, Aristotle, Gottlieb Frege, and Wittgenstein while skipping over people like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. I don’t know why this is. I thought the author wanted to make Philosophy more accessible to the common man. Perhaps he doesn’t see them as true philosophers, but to ignore them entirely is rather odd. I was under the impression that Stoicism was concerned with how to live.

The book does explain this idea and that concept with some clarity, and it is somewhat well written, but as I said, I am horribly biased. The author possesses strong opinions on other works and doesn’t hesitate to call this or that over-rated. Now, I don’t really know all that much about that, but I do know what I enjoy, and this book was not enjoyable. It was quite informative, though. ( )
  Floyd3345 | Jun 15, 2019 |
The jacket copy on this book places it with the neo-conservative movement starting with Margaret Thatcher. I suppose that Roger Scruton has the reputation of being a conservative philosopher. He certainly does not like Sartre, Derrida and the deconstructivists, and is firmly within the tradition of British logical positivists, spending many pages on Wittgenstein. He is very clear, and a very good writer, however, and I spent many enjoyable evenings with this book, thinking hard about epistemology, logic, and the language analysis of Wittgenstein. The book begins with Descarte and the fundamental problem of knowing that the world is real. Speaking of the argument against the existence of a private language, Scruton quotes Wittgenstein: "It makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain, but not to express a doubt about being in pain myself". Kant is a favorite of Scruton, especially for his Prologmena to Morals and Critique of Practical Reason. Kant's theory of categorical imperatives is questioned, however, by modern logic philosophers. I was motivated to read more philosophy, but decided to take some time away from the subject. ( )
1 ääni neurodrew | Mar 23, 2007 |
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Roger Scruton is one of the most widely respected philosophers of our time, whose often provocative views never fail to stimulate debate. In Modern Philosophy he turns his attention to the whole of the field, from the philosophy of logic to aesthetics, and in so doing provides us with an essential and comprehensive guide to modern thinking. Considered by many to be the best philosophical primer since Bertrand Russell's THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY, this book is a must for both the student and the general reader.

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