Jonathan Lear

Jonathan Lear
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
Main interests	Psychoanalysis
Influences Aristotle · Freud · Kierkegaard

Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, professor of philosophy, and Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium on Culture and Society at the University of Chicago.

Biography

He was educated at Yale, Cambridge, Rockefeller University (where he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy with a dissertation on Aristotle's logic) and the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. Much of his work involves the intersection of psychoanalysis and philosophy. In addition to work involving Freud, he has also written widely on Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, focusing on ideas of the human psyche. He won the Gradiva Award from the National Association for Psychoanalysis three times for work that advances psychoanalysis. Before moving to Chicago, Lear taught philosophy at Cambridge University, where he was a Fellow of Clare College, Columbia and Yale Universities. He is married to Gabriel Richardson Lear, a fellow member of the philosophy department at Chicago who also works on ancient philosophy. He is a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He is the nephew of Norman Lear, and the father of New Girl writer Sophia Lear.

In 2009, he received the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities.

Works

His books include:

• Aristotle and logical theory (1980)
• Aristotle: the desire to understand (1988)
• Love and Its Place in Nature (1990)
• Open minded: working out the logic of the soul (1998)
• Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (2000)
• Therapeutic action: an earnest plea for irony (2003)
• Freud (2005)
• Radical hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation (2006)
• A Case for Irony (2011)

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers
• MICHAEL DEGNAN, 1994. Recent Work in Aristotle's Logic. Philosophical Books 35.2 (April, 1994): 81-89.

Sources

• http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/001116/lear.shtml
• http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/lear.html
• http://humanities.sas.upenn.edu/04-05/event_lear.html

External links

• Jonathan Lear's lecture, "Shame and Courage at the Collapse of Civilization" at Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities in 2006
• Transcript and audio of ABC Radio (Australia) interview with Jonathan Lear, January 31, 2009
• "A Lost Conception of Irony", Jonathan Lear, Berfrois, 4 January 2011