David Edward Cooper (born 1942)[1] is a British philosopher and writer.
He was brought up in Surrey and educated at Highgate School and then St Edmund Hall, Oxford,[3] the University at which he was given his first job in 1967, as a Lecturer in Philosophy.
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.
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.