David E. Cooper

David E. Cooper 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 wenton 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. Over the years, he has been the President or Chair of several learned societies, including the Mind Association, the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain and the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, and has served on the editorial boards of various journals, including Contemporary Buddhism.

David’s philosophical interests are wide, ranging from environmental ethics to aesthetics, from the philosophy of language to Asian thought, and from the history of philosophy to the philosophy of religion. This breadth of interests is reflected in the many books he has written, which include Metaphor, Existentialism: A Reconstruction, World Philosophies: An Historical Introduction, The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility and Mystery, Meaning (Central Problems of Philosophy), and A Philosophy of Gardens. He has co-authored a book on Buddhism and the environment, edited A Companion to Aesthetics, co-edited three interdisciplinary volumes on environmental thought and, most recently, co-edited a large treasury of philosophical texts, Philosophy: The Classic Readings.

Since retiring from academic life, David has been able to devote more energy – as a trustee and the secretary of the charity Project Sri Lanka – to post-disaster and development initiatives in Sri Lanka, in which he has been involved since the Asian tsunami of 2004. He also devotes time to playing the clarinet, listening to birdsong, gardening, walking by the sea, and writing books and articles free from any institutional pressures to do so. His latest project is a book on music and nature, bringing together reflections on the two great sources of pleasure that, in recent years, David has realised, have the most significance for him. His new book Convergence with Nature, about the relevance of Daoism to our relationship with nature, is due out in 2012.

David’s life is a fairly mobile one, oscillating between Sri Lanka, the island of Gozo, where he and his wife have a house, and their home and garden in a small village in the north of Northumberland, poised between the Cheviot hills and the beaches that fringe the North Sea.