Sir Roger Scruton was a philosopher who published more than forty books on philosophy, aesthetics and politics, widely translated. He argued that art, architecture and music had turned their backs on beauty, making a cult of ugliness and leading us into a spiritual desert.

He insisted that beauty is a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature, and that the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world.

Which is, more or less exactly, the argument made everywhere else on this site — arrived at independently by me, but stated by him with a clarity, an elegance, and a depth of understanding I could never hope to bring to it.

Sir Roger was the finest philosopher of beauty of his generation, a mentor to me, and for a long time one of very few people willing to say in public that beauty is not merely a matter of taste.

What we had planned

I went to his summer school over several years — first in Ireland, then in later years, at his home in the Cotswolds. I made excellent friends there, and came to know the people who run his foundation.

Before he died we had begun arranging something: a weekend at his home, with a small number of men who cared about this as much as we did, to sit at the feet of this great man. When I presented the idea to my audience, the response was overwhelming. He was willing. It was going to happen.

Then, in January 2020, he died, and it did not.

Carrying the torch

I am not a philosopher and I do not pretend to his standing. But the argument for beauty he made needs making, and there are not many people making it.

So that is what this is for. The Ars Amorata philosophy set out on this site, the conversations recorded over the years, the men who take it up and carry it into their own lives — all of it is an attempt to keep saying, in whatever way is available to me, the thing he said better: that beauty is real, that it matters, and that a world which stops believing in it loses something it cannot replace.

His own foundation continues his work properly, and with more authority than I could. It is worth your time: scruton.org.