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In this short book, Roger Scruton presents an original and radical defense of human uniqueness. Confronting the views of evolutionary psychologists, utilitarian moralists, and philosophical materialists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Scruton argues that human beings cannot be understood simply as biological objects. We are not only human animals; we are also persons, in essential relation with other persons, and bound to them by obligations and rights. Scruton develops and defends his account of human nature by ranging widely across intellectual history, from Plato and Averro�s to Darwin and Wittgenstein. The book begins with Kant's suggestion that we are distinguished by our ability to say I--by our sense of ourselves as the centers of self-conscious reflection. This fact is manifested in our emotions, interests, and relations. It is the foundation of the moral sense, as well as of the aesthetic and religious conceptions through which we shape the human world and endow it with meaning. And it lies outside the scope of modern materialist philosophy, even though it is a natural and not a supernatural fact. Ultimately, Scruton offers a new way of understanding how self-consciousness affects the question of how we should live. The result is a rich view of human nature that challenges some of today's most fashionable ideas about our species.

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Roger Scruton is widely seen as one of the greatest conservative thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A polymath who wrote a wide array of fiction, nonfiction, and reviews, he was also the author of over fifty books. A graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, Scruton was professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London; university professor at Boston University, and a visiting professor at Oxford University. He was one of the founders of the Salisbury Review, contributed regularly to the Spectator, the Times, and the Daily Telegraph and was for many years wine critic of the New Statesman. Sir Roger Scruton died in January 2020. Mike Cooper is a British voice talent who left big-city life in London for a log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Mike is recognizable from his years with the BBC World Service, and as the narrator of countless television documentaries. A disruptive influence in school, Mike's first break in narration came at age six, when his teacher realized he could tell the afternoon story better than her (and she could get a nap by way of a bonus). When he's not in his home studio, you'll find him enjoying hobby farm life and tending to two charming pet goats, named Baxter and Hazel.

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