The Soul of the World

The Soul of the World

by Roger Scruton
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 06/04/2014

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A compelling defense of the sacred from acclaimed philosopher Roger Scruton


In The Soul of the World, renowned philosopher 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?


Drawing on art, architecture, music, and literature, Scruton suggests that the highest forms of human experience and expression tell the story of our religious need, and of our quest for the being who might answer it, and that this search for the sacred endows the world with a soul. Evolution cannot explain our conception of the sacred; neuroscience is irrelevant to our interpersonal relationships, which provide a model for our posture toward God; and scientific understanding has nothing to say about the experience of beauty, which provides a God’s-eye perspective on reality.


Ultimately, a world without the sacred would be a completely different world—one in which we humans are not truly at home. Yet despite the shrinking place for the sacred in today’s world, Scruton says, the paths to transcendence remain open.

ISBN:
9781400850006
9781400850006
Category:
Philosophy
Format:
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date:
06-04-2014
Language:
English
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Roger Scruton

Sir Roger Scruton is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge. He has been Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, and University Professor at Boston University.

He is currently visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford and Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington DC. He has published a large number of books, including some works of fiction, and has written and composed two operas.

He writes regularly for the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and was for many years wine critic of the New Statesman.

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