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David E. Cooper Biography

David E. Cooper is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. He previously taught at the universities of Oxford, Miami, London and Surrey, and has been a Visiting Professor at universities in the USA, Canada, Malta, Germany, Sri Lanka, and South Africa. He has published across a broad range of philosophical subjects, including philosophy of language, philosophy of education, ethics, aesthetics, environmental philosophy, philosophy of religion, history of both Western philosophy and Asian philosophy, and modern European philosophy, especially Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.

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David E. Cooper Quotes

The Overman will himself be a nihilist in the (good) sense of rejecting any metaphysical or religious grounding for truth and value, but instead of curling up in despair, or simply going along with the crowd like the 'passive' nihilist, he will recognize himself as the sole source of truths and values to live by.

Crowds, Despair, Religious, Sense

The aim of dis-incumbence is a hubristic one, for it requires confidence in the ability of men and women to live in the belief that nothing they do can, in the end, be justified by anything. That's a belief that it is easy to proclaim in seminar rooms or pubs, but not one that people could actually live with.

Men, People, Pubs, Rooms

An abiding and central concern of philosophy and religion alike is the fear that the world is alien to human beings, that nature is, in Hegel's words, 'out and out other' to 'spirit'. It's easy enough to see how 'constructivist' or 'humanist' conceptions are efforts to dispel this fear.

Abiding, Effort, Fear, Philosophy, See, Words

Nietzsche's 'perspectivalism' was expressly directed against the 'laughable juxtaposition of "man and world"'. But 'absolutist' accounts, too, typically try to demonstrate that human beings are integral components of the world these accounts articulate - that, for example, we are simply material bodies subject to the same natural processes as everything else.

Beings, Directed, Example, Integral, Men, Trying

I think it's true that for existentialist thinkers, appreciation of what we are - free, makers of meaning, 'issues' for ourselves, and so on - is at the same time a recognition of how we should try to live.

Appreciation, Issues, Makers, Same, Think, Thinking

In all great civilizations, garden discourses have belonged to larger discourses about beauty, the good life, the relation of humankind to nature, and so on.

Good Life, Garden, Civilization, Larger, Nature, Discourses

Gardening is an excellent example of a practice to which, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, certain virtues are 'internal'. Good gardening requires a certain goodness on the part of the gardener: care, humility, patience, and respect, for example.

Example, Gardening, Humility, Practice

Things only 'show up' for us as they do, as Heidegger would put, in and through practical engagements with the world that enable objects to have significance and salience - as hammers, pots, trees or whatever.

Enable, Engagement, Hammers, Tree, World

It is indeed impossible to describe reality 'in itself', but that does not mean that our lives are answerable to nothing but our own conventions and commitments. They are answerable to a way of things that transcends the reach of our conceptual schemes.

Commitment, Mean, Nothing, Reach, Reality, Things

It would be through individual effort, inspired perhaps by reading Nietzsche's books, that the Overman might emerge, not through social or educational engineering.

Book, Books, Educational, Effort, Individual, Reading

Like Nietzsche, Heidegger also gave up on the prospect that schools and universities would nurture the kind of reflective openness to the way of things that, certainly by the 1940s, he identified with authentic thinking. The authentic person is not the Promethean, iron-willed figure that pops up in Nietzsche, but someone more like the Daoist sages whom Heidegger admired.

Gave, Iron, Openness, Pops, School, Thinking

I'm very sceptical about the prospects for 'big' environmental causes - 'saving the planet', halving the world's population, ending the exploitation of animals, and so on - but a person can ask him- or herself how he or she personally may exercise compassion or humility towards animals, vegetal life and so on.

Animal, Causes, Compassion, Exercise, Humility, Prospects

There is no reason at all to think that creatures with very different purposes and concerns would arrive at the scientific image, and no reason at all to accuse such creatures of getting the world wrong - a point that both Chuang Tzu and Nietzsche make when comparing human and animal perspectives.

Accuse, Animal, Chuang, Perspective, Thinking, Tzu

Like Nietzsche's own writings on education, most of mine were relatively youthful ones. Both were inspired by a critical animus against prevailing trends in education: in Nietzsche's case, the production either of 'useless', dry-as-dust scholars or people 'useful' for the needs of an expanding industrial economy; in my case, a similar subjection of education to economic imperatives, but also to ideological obsessions, notably with promoting 'equality'.

Dust, Obsessions, People, Useful, Useless, Writing

How people make gardens is bound to reflect a way of experiencing the natural world, while at the same time this experience of nature is bound to reflect a culture - ways of painting nature, for example, or representing nature in literature, or of course making gardens.

Garden, People, Example, World, Gardens, Time

The writing I have in mind and sometimes indulge in myself is concerned, not with plants, mountains or birds as items of scientific description, but with experiences of nature that impinge upon our moods and emotions, enrich our imagination and reveries, and shape our sense of how we stand in relation to the environing world. In a broad sense of the term, this kind of writing is an exercise in phenomenology, an attempt to render the significance that birds, plants or whatever have for us.

Writing, Exercise, Indulge In, Sense, Moods, Shape

The garden is as good a symbol as you can find of a dialectic between spheres of experience - of culture and nature - that presuppose one another.

Garden, Culture, Spheres, Nature, Presuppose

Chuang Tzu and Heidegger both emphasise the virtue of 'spontaneity' - a sort of mindful responsiveness to things as they are. It's this notion, I suspect, that is the best bet for helping to make some sense of talk about harmony or unity with nature.

Unity, Helping, Spontaneity, Notion, Things

The focus of environmental ethics should indeed be on the virtues and how these inform our relationship to natural environments.

Focus, Environmental, Ethics, Inform

What impressed me about Plato and Sartre was their conviction that we should live our lives in the light of big truths about reality and human existence.

Human, Light, Plato, Reality, Truths

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