Maggie's Farm

Roger Scruton is in the Maggie's Farm pantheon because he is a deep thinker. (Nice work if you can get it, but most of us are not capable of it, especially me. I count myself fortunate to be able to follow him.)

From a recent short and, I feel, brilliant essay, Scientism in the Arts:

Just as there is an understanding of art, which forms the domain of criticism, and which is a rational exercise with its own standards of validity, so there is an understanding of people, which forms the domain of interpersonal relations, and which is a rational exercise obedient to norms of its own. And just as it is an error to think you can replace art criticism with the neuroscience that allegedly explains the experience of art, so too is it an error to think you can replace interpersonal understanding with the neuroscience that allegedly explains our behavior. This shift requires describing human behavior in terms that remove it from the context that gives it sense; it requires becoming a reductionist, someone who fails to see that the most important features of the human condition are emergent features, ones that inhabit the surface of the world and are invisible to those whose eyes are fixed on the depths.