This book brings together twenty-three distinctive and influential essays on ancient moral philosophy--including several published here for the first time--by the distinguished philosopher and classical scholar John Cooper.

Outstanding translations by leading contemporary scholars--many commissioned especially for this volume--are presented here in the first single edition to include the entire surviving corpus of works attributed to Plato in antiquity. In his introductory essay, John Cooper explains the presentation of these works, discusses questions concerning the chronology of their composition, comments on the dialogue form in which Plato wrote, and offers guidance on approaching the reading and study of Plato's works. Also included are concise introductions by Cooper and Hutchinson (...) to each translation, meticulous annotation designed to serve both scholar and general reader, and a comprehensive index. This handsome volume offers fine paper and a high-quality Smyth-sewn cloth binding in a sturdy, elegant edition. (shrink)

This article seeks to bring small talk about cinema – the type of conversation that can begin with the question “Have you seen any good movies lately?” – into the analytical ambit of cinema and media studies. In order to do so, I argue that such conversation is relevant to the philosophical project of Stanley Cavell. Throughout his attempts to wed film analysis and philosophical reflection, including his seminal studies of Hollywood genres, Cavell has remained committed to the idea that (...) philosophy is not a search for objective absolutes or momentous conclusions. This is a characteristic inconclusiveness that small talk shares. While small talk is often derided as unimportant on account of this very inconclusiveness, the work of Cavell provides a propitious framework for appreciating small talk's underacknowledged philosophical stakes and for reconsidering assumptions about the relative value of communicative practices. In order to better illustrate this relation between small talk and philosophy, this art... (shrink)

Andrew Cooper presents the first systematic study of Kant's account of natural history. Cooper contends that Kant made a decisive contribution to one of the most explosive and understudied revolutions in the history of science: the addition of time to the frame in which explanations are required, sought, and justified in natural science. Through addressing a wide range of Kant's works, Cooper challenges the claim that Kant's theory of science denies a developmental conception of nature and argues instead that it (...) establishes a method by which natural historians can genuinely dispute historical claims and potentially come to consensus. This method, Cooper argues, can be used to expose serious flaws in Kant's own historical reasoning, including the formation and defence of his racist views. The book will be valuable to philosophers seeking to discern both the power and limitations of Kant's theory of science, and to historians of science working on the fractured landscape of eighteenth-century Newtonianism. (shrink)

The key objectives of this book are to demonstrate the applicability of issues in the philosophy of science to problems in psychiatry and to show how the conceptual issues raised by psychiatry should be considered more closely by philosophers of science. These are worthy aims: the philosophy of psychiatry needs to draw more thoughtfully upon contemporary philosophical debates and stimulating interest within the philosophy of science is a good way to do this.Cooper's book succeeds for both of these desiderata. The (...) first five chapters discuss the central issues in the philosophy of psychiatry: whether mental illness is a disease/natural kind and what follows from this. There is a large literature on these questions, some of which …. (shrink)

In "Pursuits of Wisdom," John Cooper brings this crucial question back to life. This marvelous book will shape the way we think about and engage with ancient philosophical traditions.

We shall argue that there is adequate moral justification for capital punishment with linkage, that is, with linkage to keeping non-murderers from dying. We present the argument with two aims in mind. The first is to question the conventional wisdom, seldom challenged even by proponents of capital punishment, that being an abolitionist is closely connected to having a civilized respect for human life. This conventional wisdom, we hope to show, is somewhat off the mark. To this end we exhibit structural (...) similarities between so-called lifeboat dilemmas and the public's relationship to a murderer. In a lifeboat dilemma one must choose between saving this life or that, since the lifeboat will not hold both persons. Now if this life were an innocent's and that one a murderer's, a choice to save the latter would not be met with accusations of callousness towards human life. We hope to project everyone's intuitions about this case onto the more baffling case of a society's relationship to the murderers and dying innocents in its midst. (shrink)

We shall argue that there is adequate moral justification for capital punishment with linkage, that is, with linkage to keeping non‐murderers from dying. We present the argument with two aims in mind. The first is to question the conventional wisdom, seldom challenged even by proponents of capital punishment, that being an abolitionist is closely connected to having a civilized respect for human life. This conventional wisdom, we hope to show, is somewhat off the mark. To this end we exhibit structural (...) similarities between so‐called lifeboat dilemmas and the public's relationship to a murderer. In a lifeboat dilemma one must choose between saving this life or that, since the lifeboat will not hold both persons. Now if this life were an innocent's and that one a murderer's, a choice to save the latter would not be met with accusations of callousness towards human life. We hope to project everyone's intuitions about this case onto the more baffling case of a society's relationship to the murderers and dying innocents in its midst. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, aestheticians and art theorists declared the 'death' of beauty as a serious, meaningful concept for aesthetics and art practice. Such declarations are better understood as polemical provocations, making their obituarism premature. Careful attention to the writings of those cited testify to the persistence of beauty, albeit in new, 'difficult', 'challenging' forms. Beauty persists, taking on new forms and inflections.

The format of this book is unusual, especially for a book about linguistics. The book is meant primarily as a research monograph aimed at linguists who have some background in formal semantics, e. g. Montague Grammar. However, I have two other audiences in mind. Linguists who have little or no experience of formal semantics, but who have worked through a basic mathematics for linguists course (e. g. using Wall, 1972, or Partee, 1978), should, perhaps with the help of a sympathetic (...) Montague gramma rian, be able to discover enough of how I have adapted some of the basic ideas in formal semantics to make the developments that I undertake in the rest of the book accessible. Logicians and computer scientists who know about model theoretic semantics and formal systems should be able to glean enough from Chapters I and II about linguistic concerns and techniques to be able to read the remainder of the book, again possibly with the help of a sympathetic Montague grammarian. However, readers should beware. Chapter II is not meant as a general introduction either to formal semantics or to linguistics and while much of the presentation there is going over ground that is already well covered in the literature, the particular formulation and the emphases are very much oriented to the developments to be undertaken later in the book. (shrink)

This paper aims to strengthen the liberal theory of public justification defended by John Rawls and his followers, by arguing that advocates of political liberalism can have more to say about how citizens can come to endorse and give priority to liberal justice than has been commonly supposed. The political conception of the person, complete with the two powers of moral personality, contains within it all the resources we need to illustrate why reasonable persons would have at least one good (...) reason to endorse and uphold liberal justice, and to make it regulative of their pursuit of their conceptions of the good. This is achieved by citizens’ feelings of care and affective concern toward their higher-order interests—their sense of justice, and their conception of the good. (shrink)

Mabel Cooper and Gloria Ferris lived in St Lawrence's Hospital one of the large learning disability institutions which were built round the edges of London. In this paper, Mabel and Gloria share their memories of three nurses at St Lawrence's, supported by Jane Abraham and in this process reveal a number of ethical issues that remain relevant today.

I Deliberation, Practical Syllogisms , and Intuition. Introduction Aristotle's views on moral reasoning are a difficult and much disputed subject. ...

Any account of knowledge has to take account both of the contribution of the world and the contribution of man. Every human endeavour, every activity, every art, every science is a product of a unique interaction between man and the world. Where man is most passive, he merely reflects and reports the world; this is pure discovery, if it ever exists. Where man is most active, the world's contribution lies merely in the provision of the raw material; this is pure (...) invention, if it ever exists. All the arts, all the sciences can be ordered in a continuous array or spectrum ranging from pure discovery to pure invention. That they are all at some point on this continuum gives them a common but fragile thread, justifying our thinking and talking of the unity of the arts and sciences. Philosophy is neither pure discovery nor pure invention; it bears resemblances to both a science and an art. In this paper I propose to try to give reasons why we should regard the philosopher as an artist and philosophy as an art; or, at any rate, I shall try to show that there is an Art of Philosophy. (shrink)

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 appreciation of nature. He discusses the contribution of gardening and other garden-related pursuits to "the good life." And he distinguishes the many kinds of meanings that gardens may have, from their representation of nature to their spiritual significance. A Philosophy of Gardens will open up this subject to students and scholars of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural and environmental studies, and to anyone with a reflective interest in things horticultural. (shrink)

My ultimate purpose here is to examine, discuss, and interpret a difficult excerpt in Stobaeus’ 5th c. AD anthology, alleging to report—uniquely, it appears—a distinction Chrysippus drew between three different applications of the term stoixe›on or element (i.e., physical element).1 Stobaeus lists this passage as giving opinions specifically of Chrysippus “about the elements out of substance” (per‹ t«n §k t∞w oÈs€aw stoixe€vn), though in holding them he says Chrysippus was following Zeno, the leader of his sect. Hermann Diels (1879) identified (...) this selection as an excerpt (his fr. 21) from Arius Didymus’ late first century BC Epitome of Physical Doctrines.2 I print a translation below, with the text in an Appendix, as it is given in von Arnim (1903). The text is not without its problems, and I indicate in footnotes to the text which of the principal editors’ textual interventions I accept and follow in my translation. Whether this text presents a single, continuous excerpt from Arius Didymus, or instead some compilation of Stobaeus (or an earlier anthologist whose work Stobaeus employed) from dispersed passages of.. (shrink)

This book breaks new ground, departing from an emphasis on 'organisations' as social objects and moving towards a position of analysis which situates itself in the wider context of the late modernity. The contributors of this book acknowledge the impact of Robert Cooper on their own work and develop further his insistence that organisational analysis must be understood in terms of the rationalization of society as a whole.

Freud's collection of antiquities - his "old and dirty gods"- stood as silent witnesses to the early analysts' paradoxical fascination and hostility toward religion. Pamela Cooper-White argues that antisemitism, reaching back centuries before the Holocaust, and the acute perspective from the margins that it engendered among the first analysts, stands at the very origins of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The core insight of psychoanalytic thought - that there is always more beneath the surface appearances of reality, and that this "more" (...) is among other things affective, memory-laden and psychological- cannot fail to have had something to do with the experiences of the first Jewish analysts in their position of marginality and oppression in Habsburg-Catholic Vienna of the 20th century. The book concludes with some parallels between the decades leading to the Holocaust and the current political situation in the U.S. and Europe, and their implications for psychoanalytic practice today. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophical writings on personal identity have taken the form of attempts to discover the dominant criterion for deciding when a person at one time is identical with a person at some other time. Among the candidates for the role of dominant criterion have been bodily continuity and memory . In the normal case, where a person P is identical with a person P′ at an earlier time, it is true that P and P′ share a continuous body, that P (...) can remember experiences of P′, and that many other relationships hold between P and P′. Consequently, the debate as to which of the normal criteria is the dominant one has usually taken the form of imagining strange cases in which one or more of the normal criteria are lacking, and attempting to say, in such cases, who is identical with who. The scene was set, at least for modern times, by Locke's prince/pauper example, in which, according to Locke, the ability to remember experiences of a person having a different body guarantees, nevertheless, that one is that person—and hence that the memory criterion is dominant over the bodily identity one. (shrink)

is a term introduced by Ian Hacking to refer to the kinds of people—child abusers, pregnant teenagers, the unemployed—studied by the human sciences. Hacking argues that classifying and describing human kinds results in feedback, which alters the very kinds under study. This feedback results in human kinds having histories totally unlike those of natural kinds (such as gold, electrons and tigers), leading Hacking to conclude that human kinds are radically unlike natural kinds. Here I argue that Hacking's argument fails and (...) that he has not demonstrated that human kinds cannot be natural kinds. Introduction Natural kinds Hacking's feedback mechanisms 3.1 Cultural feedback 3.2 Conceptual feedback. (shrink)

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.

This engaging volume explores and defends the claim that misanthropy is a justified attitude towards humankind in the light of how human beings both compare with and treat animals. Reflection on differences between humans and animals helps to confirm the misanthropic verdict, while reflection on the moral and other failings manifest in our treatment of animals illuminates what is wrong with this treatment. Human failings, it is argued, are too entrenched to permit optimism about the future of animals, but ways (...) are proposed in which individual people may accommodate to the truth of misanthropy through cultivating mindful, humble and compassionate relationships to animals. Drawing on both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions David E. Cooper offers an original and challenging approach to the complex field of animal ethics. (shrink)

Cooper, Austin More than a century ago The Australasian Catholic Record entered the Australasian scene, serving the church and over time quietly but substantially meeting changing circumstances. The journal was first established in 1895 by the then Archbishop of Sydney, Patrick Francis Cardinal Moran. With a typical Moran flourish it announced that this 'tiny barque' now departs the shore with the task of confronting the enemies of the church, 'Irreligion, Immorality and Anarchy'. The manifesto was something of a war cry. (...) In undertaking this objective the journal intended following the example of publications such as The American Catholic Quarterly Review, The Dublin Review and The Irish Ecclesiastical Record. (shrink)