罗杰·斯克鲁顿

罗杰·维农·斯克鲁顿爵士， FBA，FRSL（Sir Roger Vernon Scruton，1944年2月27日—2020年1月12日），是英国哲学家、美学和政治哲学作家，属新右派，主要倡导古典保守主义观点，批判新自由主义。同时斯克鲁顿还是记者、音乐家，曾在伦敦大学伯贝克学院担任教授。

他在2020年死于肺癌。他与第二任妻子育有2个子女。

他也有研究性哲学，著有Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation（《性欲：哲学研究》）一书。在书中，他反对柏拉图把性欲和爱情二分为动物和精神层面。他使用概念分析和现象学的方法，论证性欲是人类独有现象，他的主张是人格主义(Personalism)。从此推论出性道德。

Sir Roger Vernon Scruton (27 February 1944 – 12 January 2020) was an English philosopher, writer, and social critic who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of conservative views. The founding-editor of The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, Scruton wrote over 50 books on architecture, art, philosophy, politics, religion, among other topics. Scruton was also Chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission for the United Kingdom government from 2019 to 2020. His views on classical architecture and beauty are still promoted via his foundation, while his political stances remain influential.

Scruton's publications include The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Sexual Desire  (1986), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), and How to Be a Conservative (2014). He was a regular contributor to the popular media, including The Times, The Spectator, and the New Statesman. Scruton explained that he embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France. From 1971 to 1992 he was lecturer, reader, and then Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, after which he was Professor of Philosophy at Boston University until 1995.

From then on, he worked as a freelance writer and scholar, though he later held several part-time or temporary academic positions, including in the United States. In the 1980s he helped establish underground academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, for which he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First Class) by President Václav Havel in 1998. Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".

Early life

Family background

Roger Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire, to John "Jack" Scruton, a teacher from Manchester, and his wife, Beryl Claris Scruton (née Haynes), and was raised with his two sisters in High Wycombe and Marlow. The Scruton surname was acquired relatively recently. His paternal grandfather's birth certificate recorded his name as Matthew Lowe, after Matthew's mother, Margaret Lowe (Scruton's great-grandmother); the document made no mention of a father. However, Margaret Lowe decided, for reasons unknown, to raise her son as Matthew Scruton instead. Scruton wondered whether she was employed at the former Scruton Hall in Scruton, Yorkshire, and whether it was where her children were conceived.

Jack was raised in a back-to-back on Upper Cyrus Street, Ancoats, an inner-city area of Manchester, and won a scholarship to Manchester High School, a grammar school. Jack's father was a labourer, and a heavy drinker; he had forced Jack to leave school at the age of 14 and work as a labourer even though Jack was a bright student. After the end of World War I, Jack joined a teacher training school and became a school master. As a result, Jack became an avowed socialist, one who believed the Anglo-Saxon working class had liberated themselves from the Anglo-Norman aristocracy.

Jack banned the siblings from reading Beatrix Potter's books because she was bourgeois and "polluted the beauty of the countryside and their wild Saxon inheritance". Scruton told The Guardian his father hated the upper classes and adored the English countryside and trade unions, while his mother entertained "blue-rinsed friends" and was fond of romantic fiction. He described his mother as "cherishing an ideal of gentlemanly conduct and social distinction that ... [his] father set out with considerable relish to destroy".