David E Cooper
Biographic Data
| ID | 272136 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David E Cooper |
| GIVEN NAMES | David E |
| FAMILY NAME | Cooper |
| SIGNATURE | COOPER D E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8842-1560 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 66 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1965 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Pessimism, Quietism and Nature as Refuge
Postmodernism, Quietism, and Philosophy
In my 1993 IJPS paper it was suggested that postmodernist verdicts on ‘the death of philosophy’ relied on a rejection of any ‘substantive’ or ‘metaphysical’ notion of truth. The present paper relates these verdicts to Wittgenstein’s alleged ‘philosophical quietism’. In both cases, for example, there is a rejection of ‘depth’. Various characterisations of Wittgenstein’s position are questioned, including the idea that his quietism consists in show…
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Intense Involvement in Sports
Bartók, Biography, and the Violin
Biography takes the scant facts of a life that are available to scrutiny, like the waypoints on a journey to be mapped, and attempts to form a coherent narrative from them. That coherence is, to at least some degree, contingent upon the ideological position of the author and as Michael Benton has noted, “the biographical subject is a textual creation as much as a historical recreation.” While fully acknowledging that one cannot “read back” from t…
‘Removing the Barriers’
This paper focuses on Mary Midgley's influential discussions, over more than thirty years, of the relationship between human beings and animals, in particular on her concern to ‘remove the barriers’ that stand in the way of proper understanding and treatment of animals. These barriers, she demonstrates, have been erected by animal science, epistemology and mainstream moral philosophy alike. In each case, she argues, our attitudes to animals are w…
Progress in Psychoanalysis
Dialogue
This chapter brings Daoism into conversation with Islam on the topics of animals, gardens, and stewardship. Despite major differences—Islam is theistic and Daoism is not; Islam defines specific moral rules and Daoism less so—the two share areas of affinity in a number of themes relating to the environment: that the world manifests balance or harmony, and humans have an obligation to maintain or restore that harmony, especially in treatment of ani…
Daoism, Natural Life, and Human Flourishing
The chapter begins with a discussion of Daoist virtues that lead to human flourishing and the Daoist conception of how a life goes well, what it shows about, and implies for, people’s relationship to the natural world of plants, animals, and environment. Humans are not distinct from these other life forms; rather, they are all “living beings” composed of qi (vital energy or life force). Qualities such as ziran (spontaneity or naturalness) lead to…
Dialogue
This dialogue brings together work on Rabbinic Judaism and Roman Catholicism to introduce the economic and feminist implications of the authors’ respective chapters on genetically modified organisms and Catholic environmental ethics. The authors frame ecological thriving, technological development, and the relation between the two as feminist concerns. Further, they consider the potential and/or limits of their source traditions for feminist enga…
Animals and Misanthropy
This engaging volume explores and defends the claim that misanthropy is a justified attitude towards humankind in the light of how human beings both compare with and treat animals. Reflection on differences between humans and animals helps to confirm the misanthropic verdict, while reflection on the moral and other failings manifest in our treatment of animals illuminates what is wrong with this treatment. Human failings, it is argued, are too en…
Buddhism, Virtue and Environment
Buddhism, one increasingly hears, is an 'eco-friendly' religion. It is often said that this is because it promotes an 'ecological' view of things, one stressing the essential unity of human beings and the natural world. Buddhism, Virtue and Environment presents a different view. While agreeing that Buddhism is, in many important respects, in tune with environmental concerns, Cooper and James argue that what makes it 'green' is its view of human l…
Archaeology, landscape and aesthetics
This paper examines the role, if any, of aesthetic reflections in the discipline of landscape archaeology. It begins by rejecting the charge that archaeologists should set aside their own aesthetic sensibility when studying landscapes. The bulk of the paper, however, is concerned with arguing that attention to the aesthetic sensibilities of the peoples who made the landscapes studied is essential to the kind of understanding and reconstruction of…
Daoism, Nature and Humanity
This paper sympathetically explores Daoism's relevance to environmental philosophy and to the aspiration of people to live in a manner convergent with nature. After discussing the Daoist understanding of nature and the dao (Way), the focus turns to the implications of these notions for our relationship to nature. The popular idea that Daoism encourages a return to a ‘primitive’ way of life is rejected. Instead, it is shown that the Daoist proposa…
Gardening - Philosophy for Everyone
Locations of Buddhism
Bartók
Humans in the Land
SEVERAL of the ten chapters which comprise Humans in the Land began life at a workshop in Norway on ‘Humans in Nature’. (This partly explains the large number of Scandinavian contributors, though philosophers from this region—especially Finland and Norway—have anyway been prominent in environmental aesthetics over the last two decades.) In their Introduction, the editors distinguish between ‘the early chapters’ that explore the cultural landscape…
Teaching and Truthfulness
Beautiful People, Beautiful Things
Journal Article Beautiful People, Beautiful Things Get access David E. Cooper David E. Cooper David Cooper, Department of Philosophy, Durham University, 50 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, UK. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 48, Issue 3, July 2008, Pages 247–260, https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayn019 Published: 01 July 2008
The Taste Culture Reader
The main focus of this volume, consisting of nearly forty selections, is, the editor explains, ‘the experience of flavour in all its dimensions’ (p. 3). As the book's subtitle also indicates, it is, therefore, with taste in the gustatory sense, not in the derived sense of aesthetic sensibility at large, that the authors are concerned. Some of them, however, do address the puzzling question of why the gustatory sense should, as Carolyn Korsmeyer p…
Buddhism and the environment
It is often supposed that Buddhist teachings and practices are in line with the concerns of latter-day environmental thinkers; that Buddhism, in short, is a distinctively ‘green’ or ‘eco-friendly’
A philosophy of gardens
Interpretation, Construction and the ‘Postmodern’ Ethos
I begin by recording a striking shift that has taken place in ideas and ideals of enquiry and hence of the educational practices in which enquiry is of central importance. This shift can be characterized as one from an old to a new notion of humanism. I then indicate some of the factors, at work both in our wider culture and within educational trends, which have predisposed many people to embrace the new humanism. Next I articulate two philosophi…
Nietzsche
This chapter contains sections titled: Life and Writings ‘Catastrophe’ Concepts, World and Life Psychology and ‘Genealogy’ Science, Perspective and Power Morality and Religion Overcoming Nihilism
Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment
Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment is a unique guide to environmental thinking through the ages. Joy A. Palmer, herself an important and prolific author on environmental matters, has assembled a team of thirty-five expert contributors to summarize and analyse the thinking of fifty diverse and stimulating figures – from all over the world and from ancient times to the present day. Among those included are: Philosophers such as Rousseau, Spinoza…
Alternative Logic in 'Primitive Thought
Animals and Misanthropy
This engaging volume explores and defends the claim that misanthropy is a justified attitude towards humankind in the light of how human beings both compare with and treat animals. Reflection on differences between humans and animals helps to confirm the misanthropic verdict, while reflection on the moral and other failings manifest in our treatment of animals illuminates what is wrong with this treatment. Human failings, it is argued, are too en…
Humans in the Land
SEVERAL of the ten chapters which comprise Humans in the Land began life at a workshop in Norway on ‘Humans in Nature’. (This partly explains the large number of Scandinavian contributors, though philosophers from this region—especially Finland and Norway—have anyway been prominent in environmental aesthetics over the last two decades.) In their Introduction, the editors distinguish between ‘the early chapters’ that explore the cultural landscape…
Symbol and Theory
Beautiful People, Beautiful Things
Journal Article Beautiful People, Beautiful Things Get access David E. Cooper David E. Cooper David Cooper, Department of Philosophy, Durham University, 50 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, UK. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 48, Issue 3, July 2008, Pages 247–260, https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayn019 Published: 01 July 2008
Science, society and rationality
Practice, Philosophy and History
Equality and Envy
Innateness
For philosophers the most interesting part of the claim is the view that the study of grammar lends support to the old theory that men are equipped with innate knowledge.3 I shall refer to the hypothesis(-es) of various seventeenthand eighteenth-century rationalists as the old innateness hypothesis(-es). Chomsky and some of his followers, notably Katz, argue that language acquisition would be impossible unless children possessed certain kinds of …
Teaching and Truthfulness
The Taste Culture Reader
The main focus of this volume, consisting of nearly forty selections, is, the editor explains, ‘the experience of flavour in all its dimensions’ (p. 3). As the book's subtitle also indicates, it is, therefore, with taste in the gustatory sense, not in the derived sense of aesthetic sensibility at large, that the authors are concerned. Some of them, however, do address the puzzling question of why the gustatory sense should, as Carolyn Korsmeyer p…
Unmasking Administrative Evil
(1999). Unmasking Administrative Evil. Administrative Theory & Praxis: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 377-384
Postmetaphysical Thinking
On Reading Nietzsche on Education
Experience and the Growth of Understanding
Intentions and Indoctrination
Two Types of Rationality
Collective Responsibility
Philosophers constantly discuss Responsibility. Yet in every discussion of which I am aware, a rather obvious point is ignored. The obvious point is that responsibility is ascribed to collectives, as well as to individual persons. Blaming attitudes are held towards collectives as well as towards individuals. (It should be noted that I am discussing that sense of Responsibility—moral or social—in which Responsibility is related to attitudes of bla…
Innateness
For philosophers the most interesting part of the claim is the view that the study of grammar lends support to the old theory that men are equipped with innate knowledge.3 I shall refer to the hypothesis(-es) of various seventeenthand eighteenth-century rationalists as the old innateness hypothesis(-es). Chomsky and some of his followers, notably Katz, argue that language acquisition would be impossible unless children possessed certain kinds of …
Grammar and the Possession of Concepts
Intentions and Indoctrination
Quality and Equality in Education
(1) I have rather little to say about either quality or equality, and rather more about the relation between the two. It is not obvious what a philosopher has to say about this since, on a prevalent view, the relation is purely empirical. Whether education can embody both high standards and equality — once it is settled what these are — seems a matter for sociologists and planners. Writing of what he calls 'democracy' and 'humanism', which come c…
Is Language Learned?1
Alternative Logic in 'Primitive Thought
Presupposition
Adverbial analysis
Linguistics and'Cultural Deprivation
Journal Article Linguistics and ‘Cultural Deprivation’ Get access David E Cooper David E Cooper Correspondence: David Cooper, Department of Philosophy, University of Surrey, Guildford Surrey GU2 5XH. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 12, Issue 1, July 1978, Pages 113–120, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1978.tb00509.x Published: 30 May 2006
Symbol and Theory
Illusions of equality
Experience and the Growth of Understanding
Generative Grammar and Linguistic Competence
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Generative Grammar and Linguistic Competence. By P. H. Matthews. ( Allen & Unwin. 1979. Pp. 112. Price £6.95) David E. Cooper David E. Cooper Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 30, Issue 118, January 1980, Pages 90–92, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219394 Published: 01 January 1980
Naturalism and Social Science
Delusions of Modesty
Journal Article Delusions of Modesty: a reply to my critics Get access David E Cooper David E Cooper Correspondence: David E. Cooper, Department of Philosophy, University of Surrey, Guild-ford, Surrey GU2 5XH, England. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 1, July 1981, Pages 125–135, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1981.tb00575.x Published: 30 May 2006
Illusions of Equality
Equality and Envy
On Reading Nietzsche on Education
Understanding as Philosophy
Metaphors We Live By
Aside from aperçus of Kant, Nietzsche, and of course, Aristotle, metaphor has not, until recently, received its due. The dominant view has been Hobbes': metaphors are an ‘abuse’ of language, less dangerous than ordinary equivocation only because they ‘profess their inconstancy’
Philosophizing about Education
Authenticity and Learning
Practice, Philosophy and History
Philosophy (46 works) · Sociology (36 works) · Epistemology (34 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Political science (20 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Law (16 works) · Environmental ethics (14 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Art (11 works)