•  6420
    Buddhism, Beauty, and Virtue
    In Kathleen J. Higgins, Shakti Maira & Sonia Sikka (eds.), Artistic Visions and the Promise of Beauty: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. pp. 123-138. 2017.
    The chapter challenges hyperbolic claims about the centrality of appreciation of beauty to Buddhism. Within the texts, attitudes are more mixed, except for a form of 'inner beauty' - the beauty found in the expression of virtues or wisdom in forms of bodily comportment. Inner beauty is a stable presence throughout Buddhist history, practices, and art.
  •  344
    The Epistemology of Testimony
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 61 (1). 1987.
  •  280
    Life and meaning
    Ratio 18 (2). 2005.
    This paper addresses an apparent tension between a familiar claim about meaning in general, to the effect that the meaning of anything owes to its place, ultimately, within a ‘form of life’, and a claim, also familiar, about the meaning of human life itself, to the effect that this must be something ‘beyond the human’. How can life itself be meaningful if meaning is a matter of a relationship to life? After elaborating and briefly defending these two claims, two ways of amending and thereby reco…Read more
  •  253
    Ethics: The Classic Readings (edited book)
    Wiley-Blackwell. 1997.
    This is the second volume in a new series of classic readings in philosophy and collects together the central texts in the history of moral philosophy thus representing many of the most important topics in the field
  •  197
    A Philosophy of Gardens
    Oxford University Press. 2006.
    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 ap…Read more
  •  154
    Moral relativism
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 3 (1): 97-108. 1978.
  •  146
    Metaphors We Live By
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series 18 43-58. 1984.
    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’.
  •  144
    Daoism, Nature and Humanity
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 74 95-108. 2014.
    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 way of life is rejected. Instead, it is shown that the Daoist proposal is one of living more than people generally do in the modern…Read more
  •  127
    Filling the whole
    The Philosophers' Magazine 45 (45): 83-83. 2009.
  •  122
    On reading Nietzsche on education
    Journal of Philosophy of Education 17 (1). 1983.
    David E Cooper; On Reading Nietzsche on Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 119–126, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.
  •  121
    Equality and envy
    Journal of Philosophy of Education 16 (1). 1982.
    David E Cooper; Equality and Envy, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 16, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 35–47, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1982.tb.
  •  116
    Definitions and `clusters'
    Mind 81 (324): 495-503. 1972.
  •  110
    Beautiful people, beautiful things
    British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (3): 247-260. 2008.
    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…Read more
  •  108
    Music, education, and the emotions
    Journal of Chinese Philosophy 36 (4): 642-652. 2009.
    No Abstract
  •  103
    In praise of gardens
    British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2): 101-113. 2003.
    The paper asks whether gardens may be objects of ‘serious’ (in Ronald Hepburn's sense) and distinctive appreciation. Dismissive attitudes to the possibility of such appreciation, including Hegel's, are rejected, as is the view—Kant's, for example—that garden appreciation is ‘factorizable’ into the modes appropriate for artworks and ‘raw’ nature respectively. That view entails that there is nothing distinctive in garden appreciation. Attention then turns to the idea that it is the representationa…Read more
  •  100
    Teaching and Truthfulness
    Studies in Philosophy and Education 27 (2): 79-87. 2008.
    Some tendencies in modern education—the stress on ‘performativity’, for instance, and ‘celebration of difference’—threaten the value traditionally placed on truthful teaching. In this paper, truthfulness is mainly understood, following Bernard Williams, as a disposition to ‘Accuracy’ and ‘Sincerity’—hence as a virtue. It is to be distinguished from truth, and current debates about the nature of truth are not relevant to the issue of the value of truthfulness. This issue devolves into the questio…Read more
  •  94
    Heidegger on Nature
    Environmental Values 14 (3). 2005.
    The primary purpose of the paper is the broadly exegetical one of explaining and connecting Heidegger's many remarks, made in several different contexts of enquiry, on nature. The three main contexts are those of ontology, scientific methodology, and technology. After showing how Heidegger's central theses in these contexts are related to one another, I argue, in the final section, that his observations on scientific method are pivotal. Unless these are secured, his further claims about ontology…Read more
  •  94
    Art, nature, significance
    The Philosophers' Magazine 44 (44): 27-35. 2009.
    It is by now something of a cliché of Green discourse that environmental degradation and devastation is grounded in a sharp opposition – the legacy, it is often charged, of Christian metaphysics – between the human and the non-human, between the realms of culture and nature. If one is to understand, let alone endorse, the very general environmentalist ambition to dissolve the dualism of the human and the non-human, it is by questioning rather more tractable and particular dichotomies, like that …Read more
  •  92
    Delusions of modesty: A reply to my critics
    Journal of Philosophy of Education 15 (1). 1981.
    David E Cooper; Delusions of Modesty: a reply to my critics, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 125–135, https://doi.org.
  •  89
    No Title available: New Books (review)
    Philosophy 71 (275): 164-167. 1996.
  •  89
    Meaning
    Routledge. 2003.
    Meaning is one of our most central and most ubiquitous concepts. Anything at all may, in suitable contexts, have meaning ascribed to it. In this wide-ranging book, David Cooper departs from the usual focus on linguistic meaning to discuss how works of art, ceremony, social action, bodily gesture, and the purpose of life can all be meaningful. He argues that the notion of meaning is best approached by considering what we accept as explanations of meaning in everyday practice and shows that in the…Read more
  •  89
    A Companion to Aesthetics (edited book)
    with Stephen Davies, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Robert Hopkins, and Robert Stecker
    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 …Read more
  •  88
    Is Daoism ‘green'?
    Asian Philosophy 4 (2): 119-125. 1994.
    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…Read more
  •  87
    Aesthetic Value (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (2): 490-492. 1998.
  •  87
    Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays
    with Jurgen Habermas and William Mark Hohengarten
    Philosophical Quarterly 43 (173): 572. 1993.
    This collection of Habermas's recent essays on philosophical topics continues the analysis begun in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In a short introductory essay, he outlines the sources of twentieth-century philosophizing, its major themes, and the range of current debates. The remainder of the essays can be seen as his contribution to these debates.Habermas's essay on George Herbert Mead is a focal point of the book. In it he sketches a postmetaphysical, intersubjective approach to q…Read more
  •  85
    Epistemology: The Classic Readings (edited book)
    Wiley-Blackwell. 1999.
    From Plato to Quine, this volume provides a concise collection of the essential, classic readings in theory of knowledge.