An evening with Roger Scruton

Tue 29 April 2014

Heffers Bookshop

Double interest! Roger Scruton is launching two books this evening fresh from his appearance at the Oxford Literary Festival.

Roger Scruton is a writer and renowned philosopher and the author of more than forty books, including The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton), The Aesthetics of Music, The Face of God, and Green Philosophy. He is a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC.

In The Soul of the World, Roger Scruton defends the experience of the sacred against today's fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone. To be fully alive--and to understand what we are--is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things. Rather than an argument for the existence of God, or a defense of the truth of religion, the book is an extended reflection on why a sense of the sacred is essential to human life--and what the final loss of the sacred would mean. In short, the book addresses the most important question of modernity: what is left of our aspirations after science has delivered its verdict about what we are?

His debut novel 'Notes from Underground' has garnered many accolades - here's one:

"Grippingly, movingly, and unforgettably, Roger Scruton's Notes from Underground transports the reader back to Cold War Prague in the bleak years after 1968, when the memory of freedom was kept alive by samizdat publishers, dissident intellectuals, and subversive priests. Those who experienced Central Europe under the tyranny of Moscow's puppets will be startled by the clarity of Scruton's recollection. Those to whom Prague is now just another tourist destination should be required to read Notes from Underground before they go."

~Niall Ferguson, Historian, and Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University

Set in the twilight years of the Czechoslovak communist regime, recalled from the suburbs of Washington, Notes from Underground (Beaufort Books, March 2014) by Roger Scruton describes a doomed love affair between two young people trapped by the system. Roger Scruton evokes a world in which every word and gesture bears a double meaning, as people seek to find truth amid the lies and love in the midst of betrayal.

Cost: £7