Main interests Psychoanalysis Areas of interest Psychoanalysis | Role Philosopher Name Jonathan Lear Region Western philosophy | |
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Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Books Radical Hope, Aristotle, Open Minded: Working, Love and its place in nature, Happiness - Death - and the Rema | ||
Philosophical era Contemporary philosophy | ||
Jonathan Lear
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.
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Jonathan Lear 2017
Education and career
Lear was educated at Yale and Cambridge, and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Rockefeller University with a dissertation on Aristotle's logic directed by Saul Kripke). He also trained at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. He subsequently won the Gradiva Award from the National Association for Psychoanalysis three times for work that advances psychoanalysis.
Before moving to Chicago in 1996, Lear taught philosophy at Cambridge University (1979-1985), where he was a Fellow of Clare College and Yale University (1978–79, 1985-1996). 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. In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Philosophical Work
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.
His books include: