Person

Roger Scruton

English philosopher, writer, and public intellectual; one of the most influential conservative thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Knighted in 2016 for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education." Scruton's work spans aesthetics, political philosophy, philosophy of music, philosophy of religion, and conservative cultural criticism. He was a serious, if at times unconventional, Christian, an Anglican by practice, with deep philosophical engagement with religious experience as a category.

Major works

The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), the foundational political-philosophical statement.
The Aesthetics of Music (1997), major work on philosophy of music.
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (2009), concise, widely-read aesthetic theory.
Beauty (2009), the longer, more systematic aesthetic-philosophical work.
The Soul of the World (2014), the most explicit treatment of religious experience and the sacred as a philosophical category.
On Human Nature (2017), anthropology and the irreducibility of personhood.
Confessions of a Heretic (2016), collected essays.
The Face of God (2012), the Gifford Lectures; sustained engagement with the philosophical question of God.

Aesthetic theory

Scruton's aesthetics centers on the recovery of objective beauty against subjectivist and relativist alternatives. Key claims:

Beauty is real. It is not merely a projection of the observer's preferences; it is a property of objects, experiences, and works that observers recognize.
Beauty is a transcendental. Following the medieval scholastic tradition (which treated beauty alongside being, truth, and goodness as transcendental properties of being), Scruton treats beauty as pointing beyond the immediate object to its source.
Beauty is a "call to transcendence." This phrase, perhaps Scruton's most-quoted single line, captures his central thesis: the experience of beauty is the experience of being addressed from beyond, the registering of meaning that exceeds material constituents.
The desecration of beauty is one of the marks of late-modern culture; the recovery of beauty is a cultural and spiritual task.

The argument from beauty

Scruton's aesthetic theory provides the philosophical infrastructure for the Argument from Beauty, the theistic argument that the existence of objective beauty implies a transcendent objective grounding. Scruton himself, while sympathetic to the religious dimension of beauty, was characteristically reserved about explicit theistic conclusions. The Soul of the World (2014) is his most theologically forward work, arguing that the intentional, personal, sacred dimension of human experience is irreducible and points beyond the natural order.

Conservatism

Scruton was the leading philosophical voice of the late 20th-century Anglo-American conservative tradition. His conservatism was not the libertarian / free-market kind associated with Reagan-Thatcher economics but a distinctively cultural / traditionalist conservatism focused on:

the importance of inherited institutions, customs, and forms of life
the value of attachment (to places, communities, traditions) over abstract universalism
the legitimacy of national / particular loyalties against cosmopolitan dissolution
the role of the sacred in social cohesion

This is the conservatism of Burke, Eliot, and Oakeshott, refined for a 21st-century audience.

Mentions in Six Theist Arguments - Cumulative Case (clipped)

The source cites Scruton's "Beauty is a call to transcendence" as the key authority-quote for the Argument from Beauty. The source treats Scruton as the leading contemporary defender of aesthetic realism in the service of theistic apologetics.

Reception

Scruton's death in January 2020 prompted widespread tributes from across the political spectrum (acknowledgment of his philosophical seriousness even from his political opponents). His work continues to be the standard reference for contemporary aesthetic-philosophical realism, and Beauty: A Very Short Introduction is a widely-used textbook.