Jonathan Lear (1948-2025)
Jonathan Lear, Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, has died. Professor Lear was well-known for bringing moral and social philosophy and psychoanalysis to bear on various aspects of the human condition. He is the author of Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (2022), Wisdom Won From Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (2017), The Idea of a Philosophical Anthropology: The Spinoza Lectures (2017), A Case for Irony: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (2011), Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (2003), Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life (2000), Open Minded: Working Out The Logic of the Soul (1998), Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1990), Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (1988), and Aristotle and Logical Theory (1980), among other works, which you can learn more about here. Professor Lear joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1996. Prior to that, he taught at Yale University and the University of Cambridge. He earned his PhD in philosophy from The Rockefeller University, an MA and a BA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a BA in history from Yale. In an essay at The Point (that was developed into his Imagining the End), Professor Lear, discussing a joke about the end of the human species, turns to mourning and the Aristotelian idea of kalon, or the beautiful or noble: I would like to close by suggesting that mourning is itself kalon. It is not only good, but wondrous and marvelous that there should be mourning. As we have seen, mourning is a distinctively human way of responding to loss. It is a special manner of expressing grief: an insistence that what happened was no mere change. The loss is testament to our previous attachments—love and hate, care and entanglements—and constitutes us as beings with a history, a history that continues to matter. In response to loss we get busy making meaning, recreating what we have lost and reanimating forms of life that might otherwise disappear. This seems to me a wondrous response to love and loss, a wondrous response to caring and finitude in general. Jonathan..
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"content": "Jonathan Lear (1948-2025)\n\nJonathan Lear, Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, has died. Professor Lear was well-known for bringing moral and social philosophy and psychoanalysis to bear on various aspects of the human condition. He is the author of Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (2022), Wisdom Won From Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (2017), The Idea of a Philosophical Anthropology: The Spinoza Lectures (2017), A Case for Irony: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (2011), Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (2003), Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life (2000), Open Minded: Working Out The Logic of the Soul (1998), Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1990), Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (1988), and Aristotle and Logical Theory (1980), among other works, which you can learn more about here. Professor Lear joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1996. Prior to that, he taught at Yale University and the University of Cambridge. He earned his PhD in philosophy from The Rockefeller University, an MA and a BA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a BA in history from Yale. In an essay at The Point (that was developed into his Imagining the End), Professor Lear, discussing a joke about the end of the human species, turns to mourning and the Aristotelian idea of kalon, or the beautiful or noble: I would like to close by suggesting that mourning is itself kalon. It is not only good, but wondrous and marvelous that there should be mourning. As we have seen, mourning is a distinctively human way of responding to loss. It is a special manner of expressing grief: an insistence that what happened was no mere change. The loss is testament to our previous attachments—love and hate, care and entanglements—and constitutes us as beings with a history, a history that continues to matter. In response to loss we get busy making meaning, recreating what we have lost and reanimating forms of life that might otherwise disappear. This seems to me a wondrous response to love and loss, a wondrous response to caring and finitude in general. Jonathan..\nThe post https://dailynous.com/2025/09/22/jonathan-lear-1948-2025/\n.\n\nhttps://dailynous.com/2025/09/22/jonathan-lear-1948-2025/",
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