“At the heart of [Roger] Scruton’s world,” minervawisdom.com contends, “is human experience and encounter.” He, “one of the most eminent English-speaking philosophers,” had published what he “regarded, and wants, to be his legacy treatise, The Soul of the World.” This is, the Catholic Medical Quarterly attests, “a splendid philosophical meditation on the nature of the world and the relationships that occur within it.”
An Anglican, Scruton “might receive more grudging admiration that any other living thinker,” the Wall Street Journal opined in its review. “Scruton is defiantly conservative,” but “his philosophical work is simply too sharp and cogent to be ignored.” In Soul, he warrants “there are aspects of human experience,” medium.com reports, “that cannot be measured like objects, but are…among the most important things in our lives. Purpose, meaning, love, beauty, the sacred—these are deeply significant.”
Soul is, the Gospel Coalition reckons, a “challenging and perplexing work.” Even so, Voegelin View points to “the hope underlying his magnificent concluding paragraph”: in death, “we ‘pass over’ into that other place….” The outré religion Scruton describes “prepares us for a death that we can meaningfully see as a redemption, since it unites us with the soul of the world.”
The Soul of the World
By Roger Scruton
Princeton University Press, 2014