Jonathan Lear

Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy. His work focuses on the philosophical understanding of the human psyche—and the ethical implications that flow from us being the kind of creatures we are. He trained in Philosophy at Cambridge University and The Rockefeller University where he received his PhD in 1978. He works primarily on philosophical conceptions of the human psyche from Socrates to the present. He also trained as a psychoanalyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. His books include: Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006); Aristotle and Logical Theory (1980); Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (1988); Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (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); and A Case for Irony (2011). His most recent books are Wisdom Won From Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Idea of a Philosophical Anthropology: The Spinoza Lectures (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2017). He is a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award. In 2014, he was appointed the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society and continues in that role currently. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Wisdom Won From Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)

Freud, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2015)--one of the top-ten books on psychoanalysis in The Guardian

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); rev. by Sebastian Junger in Time Magazine (July 12, 2010)

A Case for Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)

Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (New York: Other Press, 2003)

"Inside and Outside the Republic," Phronesis 37, no. 2 (January, 1992) (Link)

“Katharsis,” in Phronesis, 1988; reprinted in Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amelie Rorty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)

Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)

Aristotle and Logical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)

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For full list of Jonathan Lear's courses back to the 2012-13 academic year, see our searchable course database.