John M. Cooper

John Madison Cooper (November 29, 1939 – August 8, 2022) was an American philosopher who was the Emeritus Henry Putnam University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and an expert on ancient philosophy.

Education and career Cooper graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in philosophy in 1961, from Corpus Christi College, Oxford with a B.Phil. in philosophy in 1963, and from Harvard with a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1966. He taught at Harvard until 1971, when he accepted a tenured position in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught until he moved to Princeton in 1981. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2001.

In 2011, Cooper delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University, and in 2012, he delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford University.

Philosophical work He is the editor of the Hackett edition of the complete works of Plato, as well as author of Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus and a number of other books on ancient Greek philosophy.

Selected books Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Hackett, 1975) Reason and Emotion (1999) Knowledge, Nature, and the Good (2004) Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus (2012)