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Books

Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life by Roger Scruton

Robert Cheeks praises an intellectual memoir by Roger Scruton, Britain’s best-known conservative philosopher.

“It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God.”
Kierkegaard, Journal, 1848.

Aristotle’s argument that man “does not exist out of himself but out of the divine ground of all reality” is not one often considered by post-modern philosophers, and so it is of great interest to me when a philosopher writes a book predicated on this theme.

In his memoir Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, British philosopher Roger Scruton gives a penetrating self-examination that is often remorseless and sometimes poignant, while presenting what may be the finest contemporary example of one man’s resistance to the “personal and social disorders of this age.

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