David Cooper

Contemporary advocates of ‘deep ecology’ often appeal to daoist ideals as an early expression of ‘respect’ for nature. This appeal is inspired, presumably, by daoist attacks on ‘convention’ or ‘artifice’ which, as Zhuang Zi puts it, ‘has been the ruin of primordial nature... the ruin of the world’. But there are problems with this appeal. Daoists are extremely selective in the aspects of nature which they admire, and it is as much the skilled artisan as the person ‘at one with nature’ who is the daoist ideal. Nevertheless, daoist literature does have implications—albeit rather complicated—for proper environmental attitudes.

Efforts to conserve endangered species of animal are, in some important respects, at odds with Buddhist ethics. On the one hand, being abstract entities, species cannot suffer, and so cannot be proper objects of compassion or similar moral virtues. On the other, Buddhist commitments to equanimity tend to militate against the idea that the individual members of endangered species have greater value than those of less-threatened ones. This paper suggests that the contribution of Buddhism to the issue of species conservation should not, however, be discounted. It argues, on the contrary, that Buddhist traditions, in reminding us of the moral significance of the suffering of individual animals, add an important dimension to debates concerning the ethical justification of efforts to conserve endangered species.

This paper sympathetically examines the neglected virtue-centric idea that the primary location of beauty is in bodily expressions of human virtues, so that things like buildings are beautiful only because of an appropriate relationship they have to beautiful people. After a brief history of the idea as articulated by, for example, Kant, it is then distinguished from accounts of beauty with which it might be confused, such as the view that something is beautiful only if it helps to instil virtue. In the central part of the paper, the attractions of virtue-centrism are articulated. These primarily consist in its explanatory power. It is argued, too, that virtue-centrism steers attractively between a rigidly conservative attitude towards beauty and an anything goes one. The final sections respond to some likely objections, the last of which provides an opportunity for correcting an impression that my formulation of the virtue-centrist idea might have given. CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    What's this?

Why do gardens matter so much and mean so much to people? That is the intriguing question to which David Cooper seeks an answer in this book. Given the enthusiasm for gardens in human civilization ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, it is surprising that the question has been so long neglected by modern philosophy. Now at last there is a philosophy of gardens. David Cooper identifies garden appreciation as a special human phenomenon distinct from both from the appreciation of art and the appreciation of nature. He discusses the contribution of gardening and other garden-related pursuits to "the good life." And he distinguishes the many kinds of meanings that gardens may have, from their representation of nature to their spiritual significance. A Philosophy of Gardens will open up this subject to students and scholars of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural and environmental studies, and to anyone with a reflective interest in things horticultural.

In this extensively revised and updated edition, 168 alphabetically arranged articles provide comprehensive treatment of the main topics and writers in this area of aesthetics. Written by prominent scholars covering a wide-range of key topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of art Features revised and expanded entries from the first edition, as well as new chapters on recent developments in aesthetics and a larger number of essays on non-Western thought about art Unique to this edition are six overview essays on the history of aesthetics in the West from antiquity to modern times