Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and faculty member of the Department of Philosophy, passed away on September 22. He was 76 years old.
A member of the University of Chicago faculty since 1996, Lear served as the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium from 2014 to 2022. He was known for his scholarship on Aristotle and writing on psychoanalysis.
Lear taught courses including Aristotle’s Ethics, Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, and Reading Kierkegaard.
In a message to Lear’s colleagues, Social Sciences Dean Amanda Woodward and Arts & Humanities Dean Debbie Nelson recalled his 2024 Ryerson Lecture, “Gratitude, Mourning, Hope, and Other Forms of Thought,” and described his scholarship as “remarkable, wide-ranging, and impactful.”
Lear authored numerous books on psychology and philosophy. His works include: Aristotle and Logical Theory (1980), Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1990), Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (2000), Freud (2005), Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), A Case for Irony (2011), and Wisdom Won From Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (2017). His final book, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (2022), explored the ethics and psychology of grief and mourning.
He received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2009 for his work on human imagination.
Lear also delivered UChicago’s 2009 Aims of Education Address, in which he reflected on the roots of the University’s intellectual vitality.
“It is actually easy to say what [makes] this university great: conversation. In this community we not only have some of the best minds in the world—leading experts in virtually every field of inquiry—but we also value talking things out with each other. There is a shared understanding that if, in this brief time we are alive, we are going to figure out anything genuinely worthwhile, it will be through conversation. Each of our individual ideas needs to be tested against the countervailing thoughts of others; but even more important, it is the imagination of others that sparks our own.”
Prior to coming to the University, Lear taught at Cambridge and Yale, where he served as chair of their Department of Philosophy from 1988 to 1990 and the Kingman Brewster Professor of the Humanities from 1995 to 1996 respectively. He graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in history cum laude in 1970 and received a B.A and M.A from the University of Chicago in Philosophy in 1976, receiving first-class honors. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rockefeller University in 1978.
In the first of a series of lectures which were developed into Imagining the End, Lear discussed mourning in relation to the Greek notion of kalon, or moral beauty: “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.”
We ask anyone who has memories they want to share about Professor Lear to please contact us at editor@chicagomaroon.com.
