David E. Cooper


David E. Cooper is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Durham University.

Life and work

David E. Cooper is a British author and philosopher. He was brought up in Surrey and educated at Highgate School and then Oxford University, where he was given his first job in 1967, as a Lecturer in Philosophy. He went on to teach at the universities of Miami, London and Surrey before being appointed, in 1986, as Professor of Philosophy at Durham University – where he remained until retiring in 2008. During his academic career, David was a Visiting Professor at universities in the United States, Canada, Malta, Sri Lanka and South Africa. Cooper is the former Chair of the Aristotelian Society, the Mind Association, the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, and the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. He is Secretary and a Trustee of the charity Project Sri Lanka, and he spends time each year visiting and supervising educational and humanitarian projects.
Cooper has published across a broad range of philosophical subjects, including philosophy of language, philosophy of education, ethics, aesthetics, environmental philosophy, animal ethics, philosophy of technology, philosophy of religion, history of both Western philosophy and Asian philosophy, and modern European philosophy, especially Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. In recent years, Cooper has written widely on environmental and Buddhist aesthetics, music and nature, the relationship of beauty and virtue, cultures of food, the significance of gardens, Daoism, our relationship to animals, and the notion of mystery.
Cooper is the author of a number of books, including World Philosophies: An Historical Introduction, Meaning, Existentialism: A Reconstruction, The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility and Mystery, A Philosophy of Gardens, Convergence with Nature: A Daoist Perspective, Senses of Mystery: Engaging with Nature and the Meaning of Life, and Animals and Misanthropy. He has also edited a number of collections, including Blackwell Companion to Aesthetics, Philosophy: The Classic Readings, Epistemology: The Classic Readings, Ethics: The Classic Readings and Aesthetics: The Classic Readings – the latter four notable for their inclusion of material from the Indian and Chinese traditions. He is joint editor of Key Thinkers on the Environment. Cooper is a regular reviewer of books for magazines, including The Times Literary Supplement and The Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2018 he published his first novel, Street Dog: A Sri Lankan Story and in 2019 a sequel, Old Stripe.

Books authored