I recommend this book by Scruton

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If Mike was alive he'd be interested in this email. I often mock philosophy for obvious reasons. The main one being: to increase understanding you have to increase capacity for understanding. That's a Work statement. I.e. increase level of being. Philosophers try to reach for more understanding (the non-devils anyway) with an unchanged capacity (level of being). So, it's just screwing around to a person who has advanced to no longer being interested in just screwing around.

Having said that... I came across a book published in 1994, though its publishing date is not relevant, titled Modern Philosophy by Roger Scruton.

I recommend it. Here's a paragraph from a review I found:

"Professor Scruton’s latest book—as yet published only in England [as of the writing of this review]—is Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey.[1] The book is based on lectures Professor Scruton delivered at Birkbeck College and Boston University. His announced purpose is “to acquaint the reader with the principal arguments, concepts and questions of modern philosophy, as this subject is taught in English-speaking universities.” Modern Philosophy certainly does this. Taken all in all, it is the best and most sophisticated introduction to the subject that I know."

He has a chapter titled 'The Devil' in which he sounds like me. Actually, the entire book is absorbing. He gets to the point. He starts off defining 'modern', 'modernist', and 'post-modern', and he knows what he's talking about. He tells the truth, in other words.

Modern is just an era label. For philosophy the modern era began somewhere around the Enlightenment and the rise of the natural sciences...17th century or so. In this sense Emmanuel Kant and Bertrand Russell are both modern.

Modernist is more an attitude and ideology which seeks to undermine or disdain or transcend anything established, whether what is established is good or worth destroying. Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart composed using a diatonic scale? Well, we'll just have to develop a 12-tone scale. And use a lot of dissonance. That type of thing.

Post-modernism is the same as modernism, an attitude and ideology that seeks to undermine or disdain or mock anything established, but they no longer want to be called modernists because modernists became established, so... Plus, modernists still have to be talented. Post-modernists just want to vandalize. For instance, a modernist will look at a classical Greek temple and recreate it by building an asymmetrical structure that is intentionally ugly. A Post-Modernist will just throw shit at an actual Greek temple, photograph it and call the photo art.

Post-Modernists have done a lot of vandalism in the area of language. Deconstruction for instance. They use such means to destroy meaning (or pretend to) in Shakespeare or pretty much anything. They are active in theology as well. They basically use the same words but redefine them. Things like that. It's all devil-inspired activity, which is why Scruton titled his chapter The Devil.

In politics Marx is an example of a modernist. He wanted to undermine free markets. Didn't have anything to replace it with but the age old command economy (communists didn't dream up centralized, command economies). His main thing, as a modernist, was to undermine what is established and works and leads to more freedom, less tyranny. He's a devil.

Anyway, I recommend this book as a work in the category of getting the overall language of a subject so as not to be in its power. I've learned things from it. The role of skepticism - the central role - in philosophy, for instance.

I've kind of sampled his other books and this one seems to sum him up. He has a book on the aesthetics of music that may be interesting. I know he's apparently a familiar presence on TV in England. Don't hold that against him. Not regarding this book anyway.

Here's a review of the book:
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Saving-the-Appearances--Roger-Scruton-on-Philosophy-1400

- C.