David E. Cooper

We're never going to talk about it again.

But we will talk about the podcast because this week, David E. Cooper takes a stroll through 4,000 years of gardens.

And our Met correspondent, Larry Wolff, joins us for a spot of Verdi.

Now, our regular listeners know that Lucy and I are enthusiastic gardeners who need no encouragement to talk about our triumphs and frankly, quite often our failures.

So you can imagine how delighted we were that the new issue of the TLS features a review of Jonathan Bates' mammoth book, The Garden, Our 4000 Year Quest for Paradise.

David E. Cooper has written beautifully about it and we're extremely pleased that he joins us now.

Welcome, David.

Well, thank you very much for inviting me.

Pessimism still isn't as dominant as it was in the 18th and 19th century, but there is a growing literature and interest in pessimism.

Academics like David Benatar, Julio Cabrera, Rivka Weinberg, David E. Cooper, Ian James Kidd, and even non-academic writers as well, like Thomas Ligotti, all contribute to a healthy ecosystem of pessimism that is alive today in the philosophical discourse.

And of course, there are many people in the general populace, including myself, that enjoy observing and witnessing this discourse, and even contribute to it in our own ways.

So that was a very whistle-stop tour of pessimism.

But any view that judges some element of the human condition to be negative can be understood as an expression of pessimism.

One thing that some of the more seasoned pessimists amongst you might recognize that I have not included is any reference to the intractable nature of our condition.

David E. Cooper, the English philosopher, emphasizes this in his book Pessimism, Quietism, and Nature as Refuge.

He maintains that pessimism is actually a pair of judgments, one being about the poor nature of our condition, and the other being that it's very unlikely to substantially change.