| 1 | Name: | Dr. Jonathan Lear | |
| Institution: | Universiy of Chicago | ||
| Year Elected: | 2019 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1948 | ||
Jonathan Lear is currently John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He earned his Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1978. He started his career in Clare College at University of Cambridge and moved to Yale University, including as Kingman Brewster Professor of the Humanities, before ending up at the University of Chicago. Jonathan Lear has, over the last twenty years, consistently been the leading defender of the philosophical dimensions of psychoanalytic theory, bringing out a level of sophistication and rigor in Freud’s thought often neglected in conventional criticisms. One might say that his major topic in a great deal of his work has been how to account for human irrationality in thought and action, and the bearing of the inescapable fact of irrationality on conceptions of how to live well. Both inside and outside philosophy he is probably best known for his extraordinary 2006 book, Radical Hope, on one level an investigation about how the Crow nation survived the dissolution of their traditional way of life, and on another level an exploration of what a collective form of life could be that it could “die out,” and what one might be called on to do in situations of potential cultural despair. His honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987-88) and a Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2011-14). He is a member of American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2017). He has authored: Aristotle and Logical Theory, 1980, 2010; Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, 1988; Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis, 1990, 1999; 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, 2015; Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, 2006; The Idea of a Philosophical Anthropology: The Spinoza Lectures, 2017; Wisdom Won From Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, 2017. Jonathan Lear was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |||