Roger Scruton is a philosopher in the old, noble, and thoroughly capacious non-academic sense of the term, even if he is a product of the best academic training. His theme par excellence (and his numerous and diverse books and articles explore multiple themes, indeed) is the human soul as it comes into sight in in the world of lived experience, the life-world (a philosophical term of art that Scruton appropriated from Edmund Husserl for his own purposes). The various sciences of causation reveal the limits of narrowly empirical knowledge since they cannot ultimately make sense of the human person who lives a relational life among others; has free will or moral agency; and who is moved by love, hate, fear, and a longing for that which ultimately transcends the material realm of human existence. Current approaches to understanding our existence all too easily fall back upon scientism, a crude and fashionable reductionism informed by facile materialism and atheism. That is the path of intellectual and moral perdition.

In contrast, the world we all inhabit is a world where the human mind, and human freedom, are much more than epiphenomenal reflections of the brain, or of some complex system of biochemical reflexes. Scruton’s most incisive work occurs “at the flaming edge of things—that place where the empirical gives out and the transcendental glimmers,” as he once quite eloquently put it. He explores that meeting place in numerous works of philosophical reflection, among them Sexual Desire (1986), The Soul