Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) was a British philosopher, writer, and cultural critic whose work in aesthetics is the wiki's most frequent point of reference. Across some fifty books he argued a single, unfashionable thesis: that beauty is a real value, that judgement about it can be educated and defended, and that a culture which abandons the distinction between the beautiful and the ugly has given up something necessary to being human.

The wiki draws on Scruton for its account of judgement — the faculty, set out in Beauty, that calls one thing beautiful and another not and can give reasons others may follow or dispute. It draws on The Aesthetics of Music for the claim that listening is the act of following another mind's intentions, and that the ear is a discipline made, not given. These are not two arguments but one, carried into two domains: that taste is an achievement, and that the achievement is worth the labour.

His thought runs beneath Domain IV — Beauty, Domain III — Music, and Domain V — Philosophy alike, and the wiki's concept of Judgement is largely his.