Gordon Graham

It is well known that we owe the term ‘aesthetics’ in its philosophical sense to the 18th century German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten. The eighteenth century's interest in aesthetics, however, pre-dated the invention of the term. In 1725, Francis Hutcheson published an Inquiry into the Original of Our Idea of Beauty and Virtue. This may be said to be the first sustained and significant work in philosophical aesthetics as we now know it. Hutcheson's volume preceded Baumgarten's by 10 years, and within Scotland it inaugurated a series of philosophical writings on taste and beauty that continued for almost a century. Contributors included major philosophical figures like David Hume, Thomas Reid and Adam Smith, as well as influential figures less well known today such as Alexander Gerard, George Turnbull and Lord Kames.

Deftly combining political science and philosophy, Graham systematically examines the central political ideologies of the Western world, including liberalism, socialism, democracy, nationalism, fascism, anarchy, and conservatism. He provides a clear account of the place of ideology in politics, touching on various sociological explanations as well as Marxist definitions. He explores the ideas of Mill, Marx, Locke, Luther, Fanon, Mussolini, and Burke as well as those of recent writers such as Robert Nozick, Roger Scruton, and Michael Oakeshott.

Genocide in Rwanda, multiple murder at Denver or Dunblane, the gruesome activities of serial killers - what makes these great evils, and why do they occur? In addressing such questions this book, unusually, interconnects contemporary moral philosophy with recent work in New Testament scholarship. The conclusions to emerge are surprising. Gordon Graham argues that the inability of modernist thought to account satisfactorily for evil and its occurrence should not lead us to embrace an eclectic postmodernism, but to take seriously some unfashionable pre-modern conceptions - Satan, demonic possession, spiritual powers, cosmic battles. Precisely because it strives to observe the high standards of clarity and rigour that are the hallmarks of philosophy in the analytical tradition, the book makes a powerful case for the rejection of humanism and naturalism, and for explaining the moral obligation to struggle against evil by reference to the New Testament's cosmic narrative.