Table of Contents

Introduction 1.The View from Nowhere 2.The View from Somewhere 3. Where Am I? 4.The Face of the Person 5. The Face of  God

Promotional Information

Atheist culture involves a turning away from God. Scruton shows how self-destructive this is for us and our culture.

About the Author

Roger Scruton is visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall Oxford and visiting Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews.

Reviews

Reviewed in The Economist.

Roger Scruton is one of our most interesting intellectuals... This is an important book, with a very wide cultural range. It is brave in pointing to a turning away from God as the fundamental plight of our times.

... if you want a handy pocket guide to humanity's perennial search for God, one that will take you safely round the edges of the current religious battlefield, this elegant and gracious book is one to buy.

Extract featured in The Catholic Herald.

... [Scruton's] sequence on the structure of the eff able (buildings) is good, and the book contains many interesting and prettily phrased thoughts.

Developing his 2010 Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews, Scruton examines the view that God is to be understood through one's communion with fellow humans, and not through philosophical speculation about the ground of being. To this end, he explores the relevant meanings of the terms "I," "you," and "why," in connection with the ideas of the face of a person, the face of the world, and the face of God. His account distinguishes the states of persons from the states of nonpersonal animals in terms of "inter-personal intentionality" that is irreducible to a biological (or other natural scientific) category. One's familiar personal subjectivity (what it's like to be a person) resist full explanation by the best natural sciences, but this, according to Scruton, does not challenge its reality. Scruton develops this account with illuminating attention to some classic artworks (the book has 20 illustrations), and the book's introduction and five chapters are consistently nontechnical and accessible.
*CHOICE*