Cooper is a British author and philosopher. He was brought up in Surrey and educated at
Highgate School and then
St Edmund Hall, Oxford, the University at which 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. In 2022 he was Distinguished International Visiting Professor at Peking University. Cooper is the former Chair (or President) 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, the notion of mystery, and philosophical pessimism and misanthropy. 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. He is also the author of four novels, all set in Sri Lanka:
Street Dog: A Sri Lankan Story, its sequel,
Old Stripe,
A Shot on the Beach. and
The Crossjack Club. ==Animal ethics==