Roger Scruton wants to tell us what it means
to be an intelligent person. He assumes that
he can do this only if we already have a basic
understanding of the great works. “It would
be useful to have read Les fleurs du mal by
Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land ,” he
wrote; “I shall also presume some familiarity
with Mozart, Wagner, Manet, Poussin, Tennyson, Schoenberg, George Herbert, Goethe,
Marx, and Nietzsche.” How many of these
masters and masterworks are you familiar
with? If you don’t know many of them, does
that make you an unintelligent person? Can
you make an argument for different definitions of intelligence? What would you say to
Scruton about his definition of an intelligent
person should you run in to him on campus?