Wesley Cooper

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Wesley Cooper, Ph.D. is a Canadian Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta. He received his doctorate in 1975 from the University of Calgary. It is often remarked that he bears a striking resemblance to William Shatner.

His philosophical interests include the works of William James, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, John Searle, David Deutsch, Peter Singer, and Lawrence Lessig. He is an advocate of open-source programming methods, wikipedia, and other public domain oriented resources made possible by the emergence of the internet and the digital age. His book The Unity of William James's Thought is his most recent major publication, but he has proven himself to be a prolific publisher ever since he received his doctorate. His publications cover a variety of topics, from Virtual Reality, Feminism, and Leisure to Metaphysics, Cyberspace, and Internet Culture.

In his book on William James, Cooper postulates the "two-levels view" as a mode of interpretation that reconciles many of the tensions and contradictions found in James's fragmented oeuvre. On this interpretation, James's early scientific ambitions found in The Principles of Psychology are not (as commonly believed amongst James scholars) inconsistent with his later theories of radical empiricism and pragmatism. Cooper argues that James's radical empiricism contains two levels -- the level of "pure experience" which organizes and forms the possibilities of presence; and the empirical level, which appears in everyday experience as sense-data, scientific discovery, and ideas organized into comprehensive wholes. Furthermore, Cooper argues that James's pragmatism has often been wrongly interpreted as a kind of individualistic utilitarianism, while a closer reading of James's entire output suggests a richer moral philosophy that also accounts for culturally grounded beliefs, religious/mystical experience, and metaphysical constraints. As Cooper proclaims in the book, his interpretation of James is a break away from, but not wholesale rejection of, the more popular interpretations of James offered by philosophers such as Richard Gale, Richard Rorty, A.J. Ayer, and Owen Flanagan.