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Two of the leading thinkers of our time, friends Professor Roger Scruton and Professor Raymond Tallis, discuss their reflections on life, death, belief and what it means to be a human being. Both Scruton and Tallis have spent a lifetime reflecting on belief, the nature of human consciousness and the soul.

Scruton’s Soul of the World, while not an argument for the existence of God, is a defence against fashionable atheism, in which he argues that our personal relationships, intuitions and aesthetic judgements hint at a transcendental dimension that cannot be understood through science alone. A new collection of his essays, Confessions of a Heretic, include reflections on the tension between Christian-inspired enlightenment and Islam and on a solution to the void he sees at the heart of our civilisation. Scruton is a writer and philosopher with a particular speciality in aesthetics.

Tallis’s philosophical works offer an alternative understanding of human consciousness and of what it means to be a human being. In his recent book, The Black Mirror: Looking at Life Through Death, he reflects from an imagined position of death on the fundamental fact of a finite existence. Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic. Until recently he was also professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician in health care of the elderly in Salford.