John Casey (academic)

John Casey (born 1939) is a British academic and a writer for The Daily Telegraph. He was educated at the Irish Christian Brothers' school, St Brendan's College, Bristol. He has been described as "mentor" to another grammar school product Roger Scruton and is a former lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge and a former lecturer and a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1975, along with Scruton, he founded the Conservative Philosophy Group. He was editor of The Cambridge Review between 1975 and 1979.

He was a lecturer in English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.Richard Cockett described Casey as a mentor to a whole generation of young Conservatives at Cambridge. When Casey celebrated fifty years as a Fellow of the College his party was attended by his friends Harold James, Ruth Scurr, Sir Noel Malcolm, Andrew Roberts, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Ben Schott, Mary Killen, Kwasi Kwarteng, Oliver Letwin, Sarah Sands, Sir Alan Fersht, Robin Holloway and John Simpson and Stephen Hawking.

The Language of Criticism was originally Casey's doctoral thesis. Casey argued that critical judgement is objective because critical arguments are rational. They are rational due to considerations which, though they are not necessarily judgements of value, "criteriologically" imply them. For example, if a poem is sentimental "criteriologically" this implies that it is immature.Christopher Ricks wrote of this book, "provided this gets clearing from the philosophers, we shall at last have a compact, cogent and humane justification of criticism as a rational process."

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