Books by Mark Dooley

Roger Scruton is one of the outstanding British philosophers of the post-war years. This book presents Scruton's life and work and a careful analysis of his central ideas. It shows how Scruton defends Hegelian and Burkean view of human nature, one founded on allegiance to the State as the guarantor of tangible freedom.

This book reveals what life was like for Roger Scruton growing up in High Wycombe, how he survived Cambridge and how he came to hold his conservative outlook. It tells of Scruton's rise to prominence while writing for The Times and sheds light on his campaign on behalf of underground dissidents in Eastern Europe. Ranging across topics as diverse as the current state of British philosophy, music, religion, and illuminating what lay behind Scruton's abandonment of academia for his new life on a Wiltshire farm, Conversations with Roger Scruton is an intimate portrait of a writer who has felt philosophy as a vocation and whose defence of unfashionable causes has brought him a wide readership in Britain and around the world.

This title offers an interpretation of Kierkegaard as a precursor of the ethical and political insights of Jacques Derrida. It argues that the affiliations between the two run much deeper than previously suggested. It seeks to show how postmodern and political Kierkegaard's "religious" ideas are.

Moral Matters: A Philosophy of Homecoming is Mark Dooley's attempt to offer an alternative to 'Cyberia'. It is a book about home, memory and identity. At a time when people are rapidly disengaging from those forms of life which once bound them together, it can be argued that our happiness depends on saving and conserving them. We cannot flourish in isolation or by detaching from the social sphere which surrounds us. We cannot truly prosper or progress if we choose to forget where we came from or if we dismiss our inherited moral wisdom. And yet, in opting for loss, separation and homelessness, it seems we have done just that. We have opted for a rootless existence where alienation and amnesia are the norm. This powerful and passionate book shows how the alienated, 'postmodern' self can become re-rooted to time and place and restored to full humanity and happiness whilst moving in a virtual, hyperconnected world. In caring for creation, conserving culture and saving the sacred we can once again make our home in the world and experience the consolation of moving from loss to love.

The Catholic Church has never been so deeply immersed in crisis - crisis of authority, priestly scandal, celibacy, hierarchy - stretching right up to the Vatican itself. In this book, the author argues that only when the sacramental life of the local parishes is revitalised that renewal in the Church can be achieved.