Roger Scruton famously rejected photography as an art form on the grounds that, being causal, photographs cannot represent an artist’s intentions. For Scruton, paintings can enable us to see lines, shapes and colors ‘as’ something other than lines, shapes and colors per se. Photographs cannot do this as they are tied to the visual scene they depict. Wilfrid Sellars’s ideas on the role of phenomenal content in visual perception provide a fruitful approach to questioning Scruton’s thesis.
Roger Scruton on Religion and Politics
The recent interest here in Roger Scruton (who I’d really only known due to his Kant scholarship)led me to this interview with him from 2002 from The London Times in light of his book The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat.His conservative political philosophy is outlined as such: …He rejects the western assumption that while freedom makes Continue Reading …
Roger Scruton on Religion and Politics
The recent interest here in Roger Scruton (who I’d really only known due to his Kant scholarship)led me to this interview with him from 2002 from The London Times in light of his book The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat.His conservative political philosophy is outlined as such: …He rejects the western assumption that while freedom makes Continue Reading …
Scruton on Philosophy vs. Neuroscience
The talk is somewhat misleadingly titled “Roger Scruton – Persons and their Brains”, but what he’s really concerned to do is point out the limits of neuroscience and justify a place for philosophy in the study of human behavior. Not sure if that’s a straw man or not, but he has some critical things to say of our podcast guest Continue Reading …
Atheists Against Atheism
Not all atheists are on board with ‘the four horsemen’ of the New Atheism: Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens. Julian Baggini, podcaster and author of Atheism: A Very Short Introductionpoints out their generally unsophisticated grasp of religion. I met Baggini in New York last December when he came to speak to a small group of us on the subject of Continue Reading …