Roger Scruton, who has died of lung cancer aged 75, was a philosopher and a controversial public intellectual. Active in the fields of aesthetics, art, music, political philosophy and architecture, both inside and outside the academic world, he dedicated himself to nurturing beauty, “re-enchanting the world” and giving intellectual rigour to conservatism.

He wrote more than 50 books, including perceptive works on Spinoza, Kant, Wittgenstein and the history of philosophy, and four novels, as well as columns on wine, hunting and current affairs, and was a talented pianist and composer.

A member of the traditionalist-conservative Salisbury Group, he helped found the Salisbury Review, which he edited from 1982 to 2001. This quarterly, which was circulated in the Soviet bloc, often in samizdat form, was criticised in Britain for having retrograde attitudes. In 1984 it defended Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headteacher who had disputed the value of multicultural education. Consequent hostility from colleagues prompted Scruton to abandon in 1992 his professorship in aesthetics at what is now Birkbeck, University of London, where he had started as a lecturer in 1971. Though he felt this had scuppered his academic career, in the event it freed him for activities and adventures on a wider stage.

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In 1978, Scruton co-founded the Jan Hus Educational Foundation in Prague. Under the codename Wiewórka, Polish for squirrel (“a tribute to my red hair”), he gave clandestine lectures, assisted dissident activism, and smuggled banned works (disguised as unused computer discs) into the Soviet bloc. As a result, he was arrested and thrown out of Czechoslovakia several times in the 1980s – and, after the collapse of communism, was awarded medals by the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.

Scruton held academic posts at Boston University (1992-95) and the Institute of Psychological Sciences, Arlington, Virginia (2007-09); and he was visiting professor at Oxford University from 2010, and a professorial fellow in moral philosophy at St Andrews University (2011-14).

He and his second wife, Sophie Jeffreys, and their children, Sam and Lucy, eventually settled down in what he sometimes dubbed Scrutopia, near Malmesbury, in Wiltshire. He was an ardent Green and countryside supporter – as well as a keen huntsman – declaring that, while environmentalism has all the hallmarks of a leftwing cause, it is in fact about conservation, equilibrium and “oikophilia” (love of home), therefore “quintessentially conservative”.

In 1995, he and the campaigner for constitutional reform Anthony Barnett, who described the two of them as “at opposite ends of the political spectrum”, set up the Town and Country Forum, to tackle rural issues. Scruton was made a fellow of the British Academy in 2008 and knighted in 2016.

He exemplified Nietzsche’s aphorism that “every philosophy is a sort of memoir”. His was spun out of his life – often agonisingly.

Born in Buslingthorpe, north-east of Lincoln, Roger was the son of Jack Scruton, a teacher, and his wife Beryl (nee Haynes), and was brought up in a somewhat uncultured home. After the family moved to Buckinghamshire, he discovered the delights of high culture in Marlow library and from the Royal grammar school, High Wycombe, he won an open scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge (for which, apparently, his father never forgave him). Having changed from science to philosophy, he gained a double first in 1965, and, in 1973, a PhD in aesthetics. His thesis formed the basis of his book Art and Imagination (1974).

At the age of 24, he witnessed the événements of 1968 from a first-floor window in Paris, but, unlike his friends, was disgusted by the protesting students’ self-indulgent iconoclasm. “I suddenly realised I was on the other side … wanted to conserve things, rather than pull them down.” He began to read Edmund Burke, who “summarised ... all my hesitations about progress”, and defended authority and obedience.

Scruton was the exact opposite of a champagne socialist: he took terrible risks for his political beliefs, not just literally, in eastern Europe, but in continually expressing outrageously reactionary views, which led him to be ostracised by the “leftwing establishment”.

What he said in his younger days opposing feminism, liberalism, egalitarianism, homosexuality and anti-racism could be seen, at the very least, as worrying, and was constantly invoked against him long after his stance had mellowed with age and his happy second marriage, or else it was denounced as self-publicising hyperbole.

Indeed, lucid and clear-thinking though he was, it was difficult to know what he really did believe, and what trumped what in his multilayered thinking. He declared Thatcherism, with its free-market libertarianism, philistinism and contempt for education, “a betrayal” of cultivated Burkean conservatism, yet went on to support it.

He returned to Anglicanism (“my tribal religion – the religion of the English who don’t believe a word of it”), but it is a moot point whether or not he was an atheist (as most of his secular friends insisted) or whether, for him, God was part of what he called “the web of seeming”, the “life-world” (Husserl’s Lebenswelt).

It may sound odd for a serious philosopher and intensely sincere person to exalt illusion, but, quoting Oscar Wilde, Scruton insisted that only someone very shallow does not judge by appearances.

In The Aesthetics of Music (1997), he brilliantly described the sense we have of a musical space in which tones are higher and lower, and the “virtual causality” that makes it seem inevitable for each particular sound in a musical composition to follow the previous one.

Permeated by “spatial metaphor”, our experience of music would be impossible without it. “If someone said that, for him, there is no up and down in music, no movement, no soaring, rising, falling, no running or walking from place to place”, would we count what he is hearing as music?

Similarly, said Scruton, with reality itself, or at least human reality. If not experienced through human-made metaphors, meanings and categories, what on earth could it be? Scruton in fact imitated Kant, but by inverting his metaphysics.

Kant said that all we can know is phenomena (“appearances”) of the real “things-in-themselves” which are tantalisingly, inexorably unknowable. Scruton, in a beautiful reversal, relegated knowledge of behind-the-scenes reality to science and declared that the most important task for philosophy now is to “re-enchant the world”. Because it attempts “to explore the ‘depth’ of human beings”, science “threatens to destroy our response to the surface”.

But it is on the surface that we live and act. A smile is “really” only the movement of facial muscles – except that it is not, any more (as Scruton insisted in Sexual Desire, 1986) than erotic sex is just the mutual manipulation of body parts.

Scruton demanded that we “resurrect the human person”, and “replace the sarcasm which knows that we are merely animals, with the irony which sees that we are not”.

For all his logical stringency, he had in some ways less an analytic than a continental style of philosophising. But that style, with its mixture of poetical metaphysics and subjectivity, runs the risk of being sentimental, which Scruton, much as he condemned and eviscerated sentimentality, was sometimes guilty of.

Adamant that beauty is essential for everyone, he advocated that any architect of public buildings should consult the aesthetic wishes of their future inhabitants. Having been appointed honorary chair of the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful commission in 2018, he was sacked a few months later on the strength of an interview he gave to the New Statesman, which was pronounced to be antisemitic, Islamophobic and anti-Chinese. He was afterwards reinstated when a recording of the interview emerged and the New Statesman apologised for the way it had been selectively quoted from on Twitter. He insisted that his interviewer not be sacked.

He was capable of tendentiousness himself. In 2002, a leaked email to the company Japanese Tobacco International asked for an increase of £1,000 on the £4,500 a month it was already paying him for the placing of articles in the British press that could be deemed helpful to their marketing. Although Scruton had been a smoker himself, this did not exactly follow Kant’s categorical imperative (we should do only what we would be prepared for everyone else to have to do) of which he was such a clear, fervent expositor.

But he lacked nothing in courage, refusing to kowtow to popular piety, even if retaining a piety of his own.

Like Dostoevsky’s kindly Grand Inquisitor, he promoted illusions that he loved but could also see through, almost relishing the arcane discernment of reality’s bleakness. “Whatever its defects,” he wrote, “my life has enabled me to find comfort in uncomfortable truths.” He was a tormented soul, as manifest in his rather laboured way of speaking, but also extremely funny.

In 1973 he married Danielle Lafitte; they divorced in 1979. His marriage to Sophie came in 1996. She and their children survive him.

• Roger Vernon Scruton, philosopher, writer and activist, born 27 February 1944; died 12 January 2020