I think it's true that for existentialist thinkers, appreciation of what we are - free, makers of meaning, 'issues' for ourselves, and… — David E. Cooper Appreciation Copy Share Image
I think that Asian versions of 'ineffabilism' have an advantage over the best-known Western ones, like Schopenhauer's. They are free from the… — David E. Cooper Advantage Copy Share Image
Things only 'show up' for us as they do, as Heidegger would put, in and through practical engagements with the world that… — David E. Cooper Engagement Copy Share Image
The garden is as good a symbol as you can find of a dialectic between spheres of experience - of culture and… — David E. Cooper Culture Copy Share Image
The focus of environmental ethics should indeed be on the virtues and how these inform our relationship to natural environments. — David E. Cooper Character Copy Share Image
In the final analysis, all explanations of meaning, various as they are, serve to indicate how something is 'appropriate' in and to… — David E. Cooper Analysis Copy Share Image
To recognize that you are radically free, in Sartre's sense, but then to live as if you weren't, is to live in… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
My 'heroes' are those - like Chuang Tzu and Heidegger - who recognize that the world of experience is a human world,… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
Like Nietzsche's own writings on education, most of mine were relatively youthful ones. Both were inspired by a critical animus against prevailing… — David E. Cooper Animus Copy Share Image
Certainly each side - the 'absolutists' and the 'constructivists' or 'humanists', as I've labelled them - accuses the other of hubris, and… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
The aim of dis-incumbence is a hubristic one, for it requires confidence in the ability of men and women to live in… — David E. Cooper Ability Copy Share Image
For me, the existentialists are important critics of 'absolutist' claims, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are, at least in their later writings, also… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
It is indeed impossible to describe reality 'in itself', but that does not mean that our lives are answerable to nothing but… — David E. Cooper Commitment Copy Share Image
I'm very sceptical about the prospects for 'big' environmental causes - 'saving the planet', halving the world's population, ending the exploitation of… — David E. Cooper Animal Copy Share Image
The demands of the economy, and more recently those of political correctness and the diktat against ever offending anyone, are not conducive… — David E. Cooper Classroom Copy Share Image
As for the meaning of gardens, particular gardens may have, of course, all sorts of different meanings - emotive, historical, emblematic, religious,… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
The writing I have in mind and sometimes indulge in myself is concerned, not with plants, mountains or birds as items of… — David E. Cooper Bird Copy Share Image
It's as if, for Schopenhauer and perhaps Kant, the mind is there up and running, equipped with its categories and concepts that… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
Does the unmistakeable intent of Versailles to proclaim dominion over nature destroy its aesthetic appeal, as Schopenhauer thought? Does the greenness of… — David E. Cooper Aesthetic Copy Share Image
What impressed me about Plato and Sartre was their conviction that we should live our lives in the light of big truths… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
To describe this world is not to describe reality 'in itself', as it is independently of how we regard and describe it. — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
It turns out, in fact, that 'theories of meaning' are typically not about meaning in an everyday or 'folk' sense at all.… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
In all great civilizations, garden discourses have belonged to larger discourses about beauty, the good life, the relation of humankind to nature,… — David E. Cooper Beauty Copy Share Image
Between nature and music there seems to be an elective affinity: they fit together, and when they do experiences of an ineffable… — David E. Cooper Affinity Copy Share Image
It would be through individual effort, inspired perhaps by reading Nietzsche's books, that the Overman might emerge, not through social or educational… — David E. Cooper Book Copy Share Image
While I am happy to make the occasional foray into educational philosophy - writing, for example, of the difficulty in the contemporary… — David E. Cooper Being truthful Copy Share Image
How people make gardens is bound to reflect a way of experiencing the natural world, while at the same time this experience… — David E. Cooper Bounds Copy Share Image
The dis-incumbenced stance is the one people should cultivate, we are told, once they recognize that there is no world beyond the… — David E. Cooper Belief Copy Share Image
It is hubris, claim the critics of 'absolutism', to suppose that we could ever even approximate to a true description of how… — David E. Cooper Absolutism Copy Share Image
There is no reason at all to think that creatures with very different purposes and concerns would arrive at the scientific image,… — David E. Cooper Animal Copy Share Image
Gardening is an excellent example of a practice to which, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, certain virtues are 'internal'. Good gardening requires… — David E. Cooper Care Copy Share Image
It's one thing to assent to propositions like 'The way of things is ineffable', and quite another to internalise what it is… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
I was keen to dispel a familiar misunderstanding: that existentialists somehow relish the alienation of human beings from the world. This may… — David E. Cooper Alienation Copy Share Image
There is something myopic and stunted in focussing only on the meaning of words and sentences. And this myopia is especially unfortunate… — David E. Cooper Abstract Copy Share Image
The question of meaning goes all the way down: if human life as a whole is meaningless, so is everything that occurs… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
The main objection to the 'scientistic' claim that physics describes the world as it is in itself is that you 'can't weed… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
I started my professional life as a philosopher of language and for several years took the orthodox line that meaning is an… — David E. Cooper Anthropology Copy Share Image
I rather shared Nietzsche's conception of the kind of individual that an ideal education should be cultivating. 'Authenticity' is not Nietzsche's term,… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
There are really three players: 'absolutists', for whom it is possible to describe reality as it anyway is; 'constructivists' or 'humanists', for… — David E. Cooper Copy Share Image
One thing that attracts me in Daoism and Heidegger is a delicate combination of recognizing deep differences between human being and any… — David E. Cooper Animal Copy Share Image
