•  4641
    Buddhism, Beauty, and Virtue
    In Kathleen J. Higgins, Shakti Maira & Sonia Sikka (eds.), Artistic Visions and the Promise of Beauty: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Springer. 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.
  •  3805
    Existentialism: A Reconstruction
    Wiley-Blackwell. 1990.
    First published in 1990, _Existentialism_ is widely regarded as a classic introductory survey of the topic, and has helped to renew interest in existentialist philosophy. The author places existentialism within the great traditions of philosophy, and argues that it deserves as much attention from analytic philosophers as it has always received on the continent
  •  428
    Living with Mystery: Virtue, Truth, and Practice
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (3): 1--13. 2012.
    This paper examines how a person’s life may be shaped by living with a sense of the mystery of reality. What virtues, if any, are encouraged by such a sense? The first section rehearses a radical ”doctrine of mystery’, according to which reality as it anyway is, independently of human perspectives, is ineffable. It is then argued that a sense of mystery may provide ”measure’ for human lives. For it is possible for a life to be ”consonant’ with this sense -- through exercising humility, for examp…Read more
  •  229
    The Epistemology of Testimony
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 61 (1). 1987.
  •  213
    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
  •  172
    Ethics: The Classic Readings (edited book)
    Wiley-Blackwell. 1998.
    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
  •  165
    Modern mythology: the case of 'Reactionary Modernism'
    History of the Human Sciences 9 (2): 25-37. 1996.
  •  151
    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
  •  129
    Moral relativism
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 3 (1): 97-108. 1978.
  •  120
    Science, society and rationality
    History of the Human Sciences 8 (2): 109-115. 1995.
  •  93
    Filling the whole
    The Philosophers' Magazine 45 (45): 83-83. 2009.
  •  87
    This popular book has now been revised to ensure that it continues to meet the needs of the growing number of people interested in all the main philosophical ...
  •  86
    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
  •  80
    David Cooper explores and defends the view that a reality independent of human perspectives is necessarily indescribable, a "mystery." Other views are shown to be hubristic. Humanists, for whom "man is the measure" of reality, exaggerate our capacity to live without the sense of an independent measure. Absolutists, who proclaim our capacity to know an independent reality, exaggerate our cognitive powers. In this highly original book Cooper restores to philosophy a proper appreciation of mystery-…Read more
  •  73
    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.
  •  65
    Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Humility
    Philosophy 72 (279): 105-123. 1997.
    In 1929, doubtless to the discomfort of his logical positivist host Moritz Schlick, Wittgenstein remarked, ‘To be sure, I can understand what Heidegger means by Being and Angst’. I return to what Heidegger meant and Wittgenstein could understand later. I begin with that remark because it has had an instructive career. When the passage which it prefaced was first published in 1965, the editors left it out—presumably to protect a hero of ‘analytic’ philosophy from being compromised by an expressio…Read more
  •  64
    Music, education, and the emotions
    Journal of Chinese Philosophy 36 (4): 642-652. 2009.
    No Abstract
  •  62
    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
  •  62
    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
  •  62
    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
  •  61
    David E. Cooper elucidates Nietzsche's educational views in detail, in a form that will be of value to educationalists as well as philosophers. In this title, first published in 1983, he shows how these views relate to the rest of Nietzsche's work, and to modern European and Anglo-Saxon philosophical concerns. For Nietzsche, the purpose of true education was to produce creative individuals who take responsibility for their lives, beliefs and values. His ideal was human authenticity. David E. Coo…Read more
  •  61
    S0ren Kierkegaard
    In Robert C. Solomon & David L. Sherman (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy, Blackwell. pp. 12--43. 2003.
  •  59
    Definitions and `clusters'
    Mind 81 (324): 495-503. 1972.
  •  58
    The cultural landscape
    The Philosophers' Magazine 50 (50): 32-33. 2010.
  •  55
    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.
  •  55
    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