For the final lecture in the IAS The Recovery of Beauty programme, CMH directors Jane Macnaughton and Corinne Saunders are very pleased to welcome Professor Roger Scruton, Research Professor for the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, Washington and Oxford:
Professor Roger Scruton
On Beauty
Monday 30 April 2012, 6.15 p.m. Lecture Room 201, Elvet Riverside
The need for beauty. Aesthetic values are not simply matters of subjective taste; they can be educated and corrupted, and they connect with choices that are fundamental to human happiness and fulfilment. The neglect of beauty _ still worse, the desecration of beauty _ involves us in acts of defiance towards what we fundamentally are. I see in this one of the most dangerous afflictions of our society today.
Professor Scruton is a writer, philosopher and public commentator. He has specialised in aesthetics with particular attention to music and architecture. He engages in contemporary political and cultural debates from the standpoint of a conservative thinker and is well known as a powerful polemicist. He has written widely in the press on political and cultural issues. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a fellow of the British Academy. In 2010 he gave the Gifford Lectures in St Andrews under the title of ‘The Face of God’. The lectures have been collected and published under the title Face of God. In 2011 he gave the Stanton Lectures in the Divinity School at the University of Cambridge. His most recent books are Beauty (OUP, 2009); The Uses of Pessimism (Atlantic Books, 2010) and Green Philosophy (Atlantic Books, 2012).