Bryson James - The religious philosophy of Roger Scruton

The Religious Philosophy
of Roger Scruton

Also available from Bloomsbury

Moral Matters , Mark Dooley

The Roger Scruton Reader, Mark Dooley

Conversations with Roger Scruton, Mark Dooley and Roger Scruton

The Disappeared, Roger Scruton

The Face of God, Roger Scruton

For my Family

The Religious Philosophy
of Roger Scruton

James Bryson

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

This collection of essays grew out of the encouragement a teacher offered his student. I am deeply grateful to Douglas Hedley, who encouraged my interest in Roger Scrutons writings and assured me the present volume and the conference that inspired it were worthwhile projects that could indeed be realized. In a similar vein, I thank all of the contributors, both for their fine essays and for their unflagging enthusiasm and patience, during the challenging work of winning the funds to hold the conference. Special thanks are owed to Mark Dooley for the valuable counsel he offered during the editorial process.

When I set about drumming up support for a conference dedicated to Scrutons work, I was overwhelmed by the kindness of my colleagues at McGill. For their warm encouragement and advice, I would like to thank Torrance Kirby, Garth Green, Ellen Aitken, Douglas Farrow, who acted as moderator for Scrutons conversation with Charles Taylor, David Davies, Christoph Neidhfer, Daniel Cere, Charles Taylor and Galle Fiasse. I would also like to thank the following McGill students and support staff for their assistance hosting the conference: Richard Greydanus, Stephanie Butera, Matthew Nini, Hadi Fakhoury, Francesca Maniaci, Alex Sokolov and Debbie McSorley.

My interest in Scrutopia began at home. Scruton defends all aspects of the European cultural inheritance I came to love there first: great literature, music, painting and architecture, history, philosophy, theology, the Christian religion and indeed the institution of the family itself. I am profoundly grateful that my parents were able to attend the conference in Montreal, an event I hope they see as a small tribute to the irreplaceable cultural gifts they so diligently passed along to their children. I thank my father for offering a paper, and I am grateful to Fr. Robert Dodaro and my mother Patricia for encouraging him to do so. My sister Barbara travelled from London to attend the conference, providing much welcome moral support, for which I am most thankful.

My wife Kristi, only a few months removed from giving birth to our first child Matthew Benjamin, agreed to perform a scene from Scrutons opera The Minister at the conference, a difficult piece of music, as well as Scrutons equally challenging Lorca Songs , a performance of which offered invaluable insight into Scrutons dynamic approach to sacred things. In the build-up to the conference, she answered my stress with loving patience, and her exquisite performance of Scrutons music reminded me how fortunate Matthew and I are to have such a talented, sensitive and loving person as a mother and wife.

Of course, the sine qua non of this book is Roger Scruton himself. As the reader will discover, each contributor has benefited from his or her engagement with Scrutons prodigious philosophical and creative output. Even where there is disagreement, there is profound respect for the philosophers intellectual range and insight. His contributions to this collection reflect the patience with which he responded to every paper at the conference in Montreal. I am personally grateful for his gentle encouragement of my own interest in his work. I know all of the scholars who have contributed to his collection have been impressed by the humility with which Roger has accepted such a rigorous examination of his thought. On behalf of everyone who helped to bring this collection to fruition, I extend my most sincere gratitude to Roger Scruton for giving us the opportunity to think about sacred things together.

James Bryson , editor of this volume, is a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University. He completed a doctorate in the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, where he wrote a dissertation on the Renaissance Platonist Thomas Jackson, an expanded version of which will be published as a monograph by Peeters . Bryson is also working on a translation of and commentary on the erotic works of the Romantic philosopher and theologian, Franz von Baader. He has published a number of articles and reviews on late antique, medieval and Renaissance philosophical theology, including two essays that will appear in Brills Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Platonism .

Peter Bryson is a Justice of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal in Canada. He was appointed Queens Counsel in 2000 and to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia in 2009 before his elevation to the Court of Appeal in 2010. Justice Bryson lectured in Equity and Trusts at Dalhousie Law School from 1983 to 1993. He has authored various articles, the most recent of which was (with James MacDuff) Wrongful Conduct and Constructive Trusts: Annual Review of Civil Litigation (Toronto: Thomson & Carswell, 2007). He is an honorary associate fellow at the University of Kings College, where he occasionally lectures on art history.

John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College, University of London, and an Honorary Fellow of St Johns College, Oxford. He is a well-known authority on the philosophy of Descartes and seventeenth-century rationalism, and has written numerous books and articles on the history of philosophy, with special reference to the early modern period. He has also published extensively in the field of moral philosophy and philosophy of religion. His recent publications include On the Meaning of Life (London: Routledge, 2003), The Spiritual Dimension (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Cartesian Reflections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Why Believe? (London: Continuum, 2009), and Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). The Moral Life , a collection of essays honouring his work on moral philosophy and philosophy of religion, appeared in 2008 (London: Palgrave Macmillan).

Daniel Cullen teaches political philosophy and the humanities at Rhodes College, where he also directs the Project for the Study of Liberal Democracy. In addition to various essays on modern political thought, he is the author of Freedom in Rousseaus Political Philosophy ( DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993) and editor and co-author of Liberal Education and Liberal Democracy (forthcoming, Lexington).

Thomas Curran is the Associate Director of the Foundation Year Programme (an interdisciplinary, first-year humanities programme) at the University of Kings College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. His chief publications have been devoted to Hegels lectures on the philosophy of religion at the University of Berlin; however, Munichs Iudicium Verlag will be the publisher (in 2016) for his current project: to collect and expand his commentaries on specific Cantos of Dantes Divine Comedy .

Chantal Delsol is Professor of Philosophy at the Universit Paris-Est and a Member of the Institut Acadmie des Sciences morales et politiques. She is the author of several books that have been translated into a variety of languages, including Arabic, Czech, Korean, Hungarian, Polish, German, Italian and English. Her recent publications include Quest-ce que lhomme? Cours familier danthropologie (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2007), and La nature du populisme, ou les figures de lidiot (Paris: Editions Ovadia, 2008).