I teach philosophy in particular those aspects of philosophy that border on the arts, and there is no point in teaching them if I don't think that there is something to be learned here. But what is it? I think there are two contrasting views, one which I defend and one which I think Terry Eglinton has defended in his writings over the years. The kind of knowledge that culture contains is not like scientific knowledge, a collection of facts and theories. And when people start thinking of culture in terms of theory, it's largely because they're taking the Marxist approach of debunking it through finding the explanation of it.
What really divides the left and the right? To answer this question, Intelligence Squared brought together two giants of British intellectual culture for an ideological reckoning: Terry Eagleton, literary critic and long-time hero of the radical left, and Roger Scruton, right-wing philosopher who has written on everything from economic theory to literature, and architecture to wine. What we heard was two two irreducibly different views of the world, where each tries hard to understand the other’s view.
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