Defying scholarly norms, he took a hands-on approach to research. To study resilience, he visited the Crow Nation; to explore Freudian theory, he became a psychoanalyst.
Jonathan Lear, an idiosyncratic and intellectually playful philosopher who melded the ideas of ancient Greek thinkers with Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory to explore the meaning of love, hope and loss, died on Sept. 22 at his home in Chicago. He was 76.
His death was announced by the University of Chicago, where he had taught since 1996. He had abdominal cancer, his wife, the philosopher Gabriel Richardson Lear, said.
Professor Lear defied certain scholarly norms. He championed Freud, a figure held in disregard by many in academia, and even trained to become a psychoanalyst. He studied resilience by visiting the Crow reservation in Montana — an unorthodox approach for a philosopher.
"That was Jonathan to a T," Kay Long, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine who studied psychoanalysis with Professor Lear, said in an interview. "He was interested in intellectual ideas, but not just as intellectual ideas. It was lived experience that he was really interested in — what it means to be human from a deeply humanistic point of view."
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/books/jonathan-lear-dead.html?smid=em-share
Jonathan Lear, an idiosyncratic and intellectually playful philosopher who melded the ideas of ancient Greek thinkers with Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory to explore the meaning of love, hope and loss, died on Sept. 22 at his home in Chicago. He was 76.
His death was announced by the University of Chicago, where he had taught since 1996. He had abdominal cancer, his wife, the philosopher Gabriel Richardson Lear, said.
Professor Lear defied certain scholarly norms. He championed Freud, a figure held in disregard by many in academia, and even trained to become a psychoanalyst. He studied resilience by visiting the Crow reservation in Montana — an unorthodox approach for a philosopher.
"That was Jonathan to a T," Kay Long, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine who studied psychoanalysis with Professor Lear, said in an interview. "He was interested in intellectual ideas, but not just as intellectual ideas. It was lived experience that he was really interested in — what it means to be human from a deeply humanistic point of view."
(Continues)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/books/jonathan-lear-dead.html?smid=em-share
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