Thomas Cooper

Born Oct. 22, 1759, in Westminster; died May 11, 1839, in Columbia, S.C. Anglo-American materialist philosopher, physician, chemist, economist, and political figure.

Cooper studied at Oxford and was a member of the Manchester Constitutional Society. During the French Revolution he visited France (1792), and in 1793 he emigrated to the USA with the family of his teacher and father-in-law, the English scholar and philosopher J. Priestley. He became a friend of T. Jefferson. He was appointed a judge and later taught chemistry and economics, serving as president of South Carolina College in Columbia from 1821 to 1833. In his philosophical works and anonymous antireligious pamphlets, Cooper advocated a materialist and atheist world view, denying the existence of a spiritual substance, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of free will and innate ideas. Cooper’s work on psychophysiology followed the trend initiated by the French materialists J. La Mettrie and P. Cabanis.