It turns out, in fact, that 'theories of meaning' are typically not about meaning in an everyday or 'folk' sense at all. They are theories designed to compute the truth or assertibility conditions of sentences from their components. David E. Cooper More Quotes by David E. Cooper More Quotes From David E. Cooper In 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. Cooper good-life garden civilization Does the unmistakeable intent of Versailles to proclaim dominion over nature destroy its aesthetic appeal, as Schopenhauer thought? Does the greenness of the lawn lose its allure when we learn how much water, sorely needed elsewhere, it uses? And historical shifts in garden taste - from formal, 'French' gardens to 'Capability' Brown's landscapes, for instance, or from the elaborate gardens of imperial Kyoto to Zen 'dry' gardens - register important changes in philosophical or religious attitudes. David E. Cooper philosophical religious attitude Gardening is an excellent example of a practice to which, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, certain virtues are 'internal'. Good gardening requires a certain goodness on the part of the gardener: care, humility, patience, and respect, for example. David E. Cooper gardening humility practice As for the meaning of gardens, particular gardens may have, of course, all sorts of different meanings - emotive, historical, emblematic, religious, commemorative, and so on. But I think that good gardens all signify or exemplify an important truth about the relationship of culture and nature - their inseparability. David E. Cooper garden religious thinking How people make gardens is bound to reflect a way of experiencing the natural world, while at the same time this experience of nature is bound to reflect a culture - ways of painting nature, for example, or representing nature in literature, or of course making gardens. David E. Cooper garden people way The garden is as good a symbol as you can find of a dialectic between spheres of experience - of culture and nature - that presuppose one another. David E. Cooper spheres garden culture I 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. Cooper mind reality thinking
