Cooper, Thomas

Cooper, Thomas

(1759–1839) social agitator, scientist, educator; born in Westminster, England. Trained as a lawyer and doctor, with a smattering of chemistry and philosophy, he espoused radical ideas that closed off advancement in England; so in 1794 he emigrated to the U.S.A. with Joseph Priestley. He practiced both law and medicine in Pennsylvania but also became a pamphleteer in support of Thomas Jefferson; attacking the Sedition Law, he was briefly imprisoned and fined $400 (1800). Between 1801–04 he served as a Luzerne County (Pa.) commissioner and then as a Pennsylvania state judge (1804–11); by then he was becoming more conservative and, disgusted with politics, he turned to teaching chemistry, first at Carlisle (now Dickinson) College (1811–15), then at the University of Pennsylvania (1815–19). Moving on to South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina), he soon became its president (1820–34) while teaching the sciences and political economy; he helped open the first medical school and insane asylum in the state. His strong individualism and libertarianism led him to become a defender of states' rights and he promoted the southern view on the tariff, nullification, and even slavery; following his own logic, he was one of the first to argue for secession.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Cooper, Thomas

 

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.

WORKS

Tracts, Ethical, Theological and Political. Warrington, 1789.
Political Essays. Philadelphia, 1800.
A View of the Metaphysical and Physiological Arguments in Favor of Materialism. Philadelphia, 1823.
The Scripture Doctrine of Materialism. Philadelphia, 1823.
Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy. Columbia, 1826.
In Russian translation:
In Amerikanskie prosvetiteli, vol. 2. Moscow, 1969. Pages 325–408.

REFERENCES

Gol’dberg, N. M. Svobodomyslie i ateizm v SShA. Moscow-Leningrad, 1965. Chapter 5.
Malone, D. The Public Life of Th. Cooper. New Haven-London, 1926.

B. E. BYKHOVSKII

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.