Like Nietzsche's own writings on education, most of mine were relatively youthful ones. Both were inspired by a critical animus against prevailing trends in education: in Nietzsche's case, the production either of 'useless', dry-as-dust scholars or people 'useful' for the needs of an expanding industrial economy; in my case, a similar subjection of education to economic imperatives, but also to ideological obsessions, notably with promoting 'equality'.
David E. CooperTo recognize that you are radically free, in Sartre's sense, but then to live as if you weren't, is to live in bad faith, in denial of what you know to be true. And that's not something anyone can sensibly want to do.
David E. CooperThings only 'show up' for us as they do, as Heidegger would put, in and through practical engagements with the world that enable objects to have significance and salience - as hammers, pots, trees or whatever.
David E. CooperI think that Asian versions of 'ineffabilism' have an advantage over the best-known Western ones, like Schopenhauer's. They are free from the dualistic image of the world of experience as the joint product of mind and reality.
David E. CooperIn all great civilizations, garden discourses have belonged to larger discourses about beauty, the good life, the relation of humankind to nature, and so on.
David E. CooperLike Nietzsche, Heidegger also gave up on the prospect that schools and universities would nurture the kind of reflective openness to the way of things that, certainly by the 1940s, he identified with authentic thinking. The authentic person is not the Promethean, iron-willed figure that pops up in Nietzsche, but someone more like the Daoist sages whom Heidegger admired.
David E. CooperFor many years, questions about the meaning of life were dismissed as senseless. We were told that life, not being a word or sentence or anything language-like, can't intelligibly be said to have meaning. An encouraging development in the last couple of decades is a return by philosophers to addressing - as nearly all people do at some time or another - the question of life's meaning.
David E. Cooper