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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

In Memoriam: Jonathan Lear (1948-2025) (UPDATED; ORIGINALLY POSTED 9/22/25)

I’m very sorry to report that my colleague Jonathan Lear died this morning.  During his long career, he taught at Cambridge University, Yale University, and the University of Chicago, and wrote importantly on Aristotle and Freud, as well as on a range of topics in ethics (broadly speaking).  You can learn more about his work here. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Lear or for those who want to comment on the significance of his work.

UPDATE: A memorial notice from Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where Professor Lear held his primary appointment.

ANOTHER: The University of Chicago memorial notice and also one from the Philosophy Department.

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18 responses to “In Memoriam: Jonathan Lear (1948-2025) (UPDATED; ORIGINALLY POSTED 9/22/25)”

  1. I was lucky to have two encounters with Jonathan Lear. First, in the early 1990s at a Manhattan cocktail party on Riverside Drive. I was thrilled to meet the author of “Sets and Semantics,” one of the most brilliant papers I had read as a grad student, even though by that time Lear had (as I saw it) apostatized into psychoanalysis. When I effusively praised his early work in the philosophy of mathematics–I mean, in his Rockefeller U. dissertation the guy found a proto-compactness theorem in Aristotle, for Christ’s sake!!–he turned to his date and said to her, “See, I really used to be something.” Then, about a dozen years ago, I spent a week in Jonathan’s company on the Cote d’Azur with a gaggle of intellectualoids who had been convened by a certain tech billionaire whose name must not be mentioned. The whole time I kept annoying him by saying, “Jonathan, I’m a pretty happy guy–would psychoanalysis do me any good?” He politely dodged my facetious question. But later that week, when challenged by a star quantum-computation guy to give a defense of Freudian psychoanalysis–was it really better than CBT or any other random therapy, given that they were all pretty much empirically indistinguishable in their benefits?–Jonathan gave an answer that was about two degrees of profundity beyond anything I had heard before on the matter. I was both shamed and moved. Jonathan’s mind ranged from the heights of platonic heaven to the foul rag and bone shop of the human heart.

  2. Lear’s work was a huge influence on me as a student. His book, “Aristotle: The Desire to Understand” was assigned to us in my Aristotle seminar at the University of Michigan, back in the 1980s, and shaped my understanding of this greatest of Greek philosophers. A huge loss. RIP.

  3. I have long admired his works on Freudian ideas psychoanalysis, hence I have read virtually every book of his, save the one on Aristotle. I may be mistaken, but I don’t recall Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard University Press, 2006) receiving the kind of attention from philosophers and psychologists (or even sociologists) that it deserved. It was a courageous and revelatory book. In any case, a remarkable philosopher … and those of us who are attracted to psychoanalysis as at once a “science of subjectivity (or ‘the person’),” a philosophy of mind, a powerful perspective on human nature, as well as, of course, a therapeutic regimen, are fortunate and grateful for his illumination and analyses of psychoanalytic ideas and methods. He, almost alone (with Richard Wollheim, Marcia Cavell, Ilham Dilman, among a few others), made “philosophy of psychoanalysis” credible, intriguing or provocative, and analytically respectable (pardon the pun), as well as eminently defensible!

    1. erratum: … on Freudian ideas and psychoanalysis …

  4. I first met Jonathan at an Eastern APA conference, when I was still in graduate school, probably 1988 or around then. I had read something of his on Wittgenstein and something of Freud. He was very friendly and gracious. We were in intermittent contact in my early teaching years, but starting in the mid-nineties our paths crossed again and again and we became good friends. For the past 20 years or so I counted on seeing him at least once a year, either in Chicago or somewhere else in the summer. By then he was one of my treasured friends. It was only just only just last month that we had dinner together. He’d been in treatment and had been given a reprieve for two weeks. He was his old self, vibrant and optimistic. Hopeful about recovery but of course not certain about it. He looked and seemed so good that I really thought he would make it. The news today leaves me shocked. We were just in e-mail contact last week, talking about Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘At the Fishhouses’, which involves an encounter with a seal (Jonathan himself had one on Cape Cod years ago). The world without him is hard for me to contemplate. He was a wonderful man, and an irreplacable thinker and friend.

  5. I did not know Jonathan Lear but I taught “Radical Hope” as part of a first-year graduate seminar in History at Northwestern. The goal of that class was to consider some of the ways in which history and philosophy might inform each other, and especially what historians might gain from a sensitivity to philosophy. In reading “Radical Hope,” we discussed how to situate it in terms of genre, whether it was a work of history, or historical anthropology, or philosophical anthropology, or something else; we discussed its style and composition; if the subaltern could speak, what it meant seriously to consider the implications of what they had said; how we go about ‘world-making’ and the destruction of such ‘worlds,’ among other questions. In later weeks we read R.G. Collingwood, Pinkard on Hegel’s philosophy of history, Ian Hacking on “Rewriting the Soul,” and many other stimulating works. But time and again, students returned to “Radical Hope,” the questions it asked, and the kinds of answers we might give to those questions. It became, for us, while unexpectedly teaching online for a year, a lodestone for imaginative, sensitive, humanistic inquiry.

  6. I first met Jonathan Lear in the late 1990s, when I visited Chicago as a prospective graduate student. I had read and been deeply impressed by Lear’s striking, metaphysical interpretation of psychoanalysis in Love and Its Place in Nature (1990), and I thought of him as a famous person — which, within the boundaries of academia at least, he was. So when I was informed that I would be having “lunch with Professor Lear,” I was quite nervous and resolved to order something simple that would not give me a lot to manage while we had our meeting. I consequently ordered some kind of sandwich and an orange juice, only to find when the food arrived that I was brought a large plate of orange halves and a pump-handled juicing mechanism. “You knew we do juice-your-own?” the waiter said. I remember saying “Sure” — I don’t know why I felt embarrassed to admit otherwise — and then trying to brazen things out while Lear and I talked about Melanie Klein, with me all the while pumping and squirting little sprays of orange juice in unpredictable directions. It was a moment made for psychoanalysis, and over the course of knowing him, I came to realize that Jonathan — as I eventually came to call him — had the power to elicit this sort of thing from people, a power he somehow managed to exercise in the classic analytic manner, by withholding comment and just letting people expose their inner lives to him, as we all somehow wanted to do.

    I had the fortunate opportunity to make a second and better impression on Jonathan starting in 2009, when he came with his family to give the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Harvard, where I had got my first job. Jonathan and his partner, the philosopher Gabriel Lear, took an interest in me, and when a few years later Jonathan won a very generous prize from the Mellon Foundation, he invited me to co-teach a seminar with him and paid for me to fly weekly to Chicago for the purpose. That wonderful and stimulating experience led eventually to my moving to the University of Chicago in 2015, where Jonathan and Gabriel became my colleagues and Jonathan and I went on to teach two more seminars together, each of which was an intellectual watershed for me. The first of these was a seminar on imagination in which Jonathan taught a glorious sequence of classes on Freud’s concept of dream work and the way that human sexuality is permeated, down to its most basic elements, by imagination. The second was a seminar on the notion of “the world” considered as a totality, in which Jonathan taught sections of his beautiful final book, Imagining the End (2022), in which he analyzes fantasies about the end of the world and their connection with our ability or inability to mourn what we have lost.

    The title of that book, “Imagining the End,” makes it sound valedictory, but I do not think at the time that Jonathan had any thought of its being his final book. Even after he was diagnosed with a serious cancer a year or so later, his prospects seemed hopeful. His sudden death has caught everyone who cared about him very much unprepared. I had been exchanging emails with him about getting together, but not with any sense of urgency. There are many things I wish I had had the opportunity to say to him. For all the brilliancy of his work, one of his most striking qualities was his ability to facilitate other people in discovering their own best thoughts. More than any academic of comparable stature that I have encountered, he loved to listen to other people talk about subjects they knew well. He used to tell a story about doing this as a boy in Provincetown, where his family spent time in the summers, and a boyish delight came over him whenever somebody said something thought-provoking in his presence. His generosity of interest helped many people find their voices, and he did this for me in a way I believe he recognized, but which I wish I had acknowledged more fully before now.

    Jonathan put his power to draw out the thoughts of other people to an especially significant use in one of his best known books, Radical Hope (2006), a reflection on the ethical problem of facing the demise of one’s way of life, which grew out of a sustained and deep engagement with the Apsáalooke Nation of Native American people. He told the story of that engagement in the book, and I am hardly the person to add detail, except to say that for decades after the book was published, he would return regularly to the Apsáalooke Reservation to visit people he had gotten to know, and that one of his proudest accomplishments was to have brought a delegation of Apsáalooke people to Chicago in 2020 for a parade to inaugurate an exhibition — the first curated by an indigenous scholar — of Apsáalooke art and artifacts at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.

    The latter event was also characteristic of Jonathan in another way, namely that, in spite of the modesty of his self-presentation, one was periodically reminded that his life transcended ordinary academia. He was often being called on to have a “public conversation” with some well-known personage or other, and it would periodically emerge — despite his best efforts to keep such things under wraps — that he and Gabriel had recently had some bigwig over to dinner. I often had the vague sense when meeting with him that he was about to be helicoptered somewhere.

    In his personal life, such as I knew it, Jonathan had a fondness for Macallan whisky and a wonderful way of telling stories about the absurdity and vainglory of academic life — none of which I can repeat for fear of offending those still living. He had been following Bob Dylan since Dylan’s early days as a coffee shop performer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he had a persuasive sense of some connection between their two lives which makes me fear now for Dylan’s well-being. After his cancer diagnosis, Jonathan lived with an awareness of mortal illness in remarkable way, giving no sign that I could discern of anxiety or regret or diminished pleasure in ordinary things, but getting if anything all the more happiness from life with his family, from teaching, and from thinking about the topics in philosophy and psychoanalysis that he had always loved.

    For me, he was one of the pillars on which I rested my sense of the value of my own work. I suspect I am not alone in finding it helpful, when writing, to imagine a person who might appreciate what I am up to and see the best in it. It is not easy to find such people, and Jonathan was a crucial one for me. I suspect he would say something psychoanalytic about this — or rather, he would think something psychoanalytic, but gracefully refrain from saying it in order not to throw grit into my mechanism. I will miss him very much, for that reason and many others.

    1. Thank you for that beautifully written memorial remembrance. It helps to hear from those who knew him personally. I happen to be doing research at the moment on philosophers of a secular orientation who nonetheless find compelling reasons to discuss the value of prayer of one kind or another (although typically not petitionary) as but one form of spiritual praxis (part of a greater regimen of a ‘therapy of desire,’ emotional transformation, or self-cultivation, or simply and more widely ‘spiritual exercises’). For that reason I am sharing the the last paragraph of the final chapter of Lear’s Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022):

      “The experience of gratitude as basic attunement does not provide evidence of anything. But neither is its call silenced when one recognizes its deep roots in the human psyche [or, for Pascal, the heart]. Those who experience it are bequeathed something enigmatic. It is internal to the grammar of gratitude that it is directed toward a benefactor. But what kind of sense can we make of this when our gratitude is no longer directed toward a benefaction in the world but rather toward ‘the world’ in which magnificent benefactions occur? It is such experiences, I think, that occasion an impulse in the direction of prayer—at least that form of prayer that is an expression of gratitude. For those who have never experienced gratitude as basic attunement, these reflections will seem misplaced. But those who have will recognize that there is an issue here that may be ignored but cannot in truth be talked away.”

    2. Thank you, for several reasons, for your story about when you first met Jonathan Lear. I suspect we all have an orange juice/orange presser story in our personal histories, where we opt for something we expect to be safe in the presence of something/someone awesome, and the safe option badly backfires, and we have to brave it out, recognising too late the hazards of expectations.
      I was shocked to hear of Jonathan Lear’s death yesterday. I barely knew him when I house-sat his house in Cambridge, England in 1981 when he was away on sabbatical. Given how little I knew him, I have a surprisingly vivid memory of an exchange with him and his wife at the time, Cynthia Farrar, both of whom had studied at Yale as had I, though not at the same time. They had both enjoyed their time there hugely and I had not. They assumed I would have found it as stimulating as they had and were a bit taken aback that I hadn’t. Jonathan was curious and intrigued by my experience. We had a conversation, as I recall, on the stairs up to the landing of the first floor of their small terraced house. I don’t remember any other interactions, but that one has stayed with me I think because it struck a nerve at the time that I can still feel. As you say, ‘Jonathan … had the power to elicit this sort of thing from people, a power he somehow managed to exercise in the classic analytic manner, by withholding comment and just letting people expose their inner lives to him’. I now want to get to know him belatedly through his books.

  7. I read his book “Radical Hope” in an ethics class in grad school almost 20 years ago and I loved the somewhat ambivalent comparison of Plenty Coups’ and Sitting Bull’s response. I still think about it today. Fare thee well, Professor Lear.

    Mark Simpson

  8. Others have noted this but I feel compelled to repeat: he had a way of seeing through noise, wafting it away with his intent and serious eyes. When I was 20, 21, enamored with his strange mixture of seriousness and delight, I wanted nothing more than to be like him: so present and alive to the feeling of life. I wished to be his apprentice, his disciple, and he was kind enough to shepherd me along, and away, to find a path more my own. It must be the greatest double-gift I’ve been given: the glimpse of his light, and the push towards my own. His memory is already, as we say, a blessing.

    This morning I was remembering how much he liked this passage from Kierkegaard’s Postscript. If I remember correctly, he almost could not speak through his laughter as we discussed it in class:

    ‘Lucian has Charon in the underworld tell the following story. A man in the upper world stood talking with one of his friends, whom he then invited to dinner, promising him a rare dish. The friend thanked him for the invitation. The man then said: But be sure now to come. Definitely, replied the invited friend. So they parted and a roof tile fell down and killed the prospective guest– isn’t that something to die laughing over?, adds Charon. Suppose now that the invited guest had been an orator, who perhaps just a moment previously had stirred himself and others by discoursing on the uncertainty of everything! For that is how people speak: one moment they know everything, in the same moment they do not.’

  9. Not having known Lear, I wasn’t going to post anything, but Daniel Licht’s reference to Lear’s eyes reminds me of the two times I heard him lecture. Before that, I had first read through Aristotle in the late 1980s with Ross’s and Lear’s books as my constant companions; I had cribbed with Aristotle and Logical Theory when I was called on for my first academic lecture on Aristotle and syllogisms; Lear’s essays and chapters on Aristotle’s ethics and tragic catharsis permanently informed my understanding; Radical Hope changed my life, and I’ve recommended it countless times; and I reviewed Lear’s last book as a kind of homage. But the eyes: The first time I heard Lear speak was at a memorial panel for Richard Wollheim. As one of the speakers was droning on I started falling asleep, and through my heavy lids I noticed that Lear was staring at me with what seemed to be a penetrating yet sympathetic gaze. I imagined that he must have thought that my falling asleep was a kind of neurotic avoidance response (something I think he discussed in one of his books), whereas in fact I habitually fall asleep during academic lectures (sometimes a cigar is just a cigar). The second time was as a respondent (along with Raymond Geuss and Judith Butler) to Axel Honneth’s Tanner Lectures on reification. Butler was in characteristic appalling form, addressing Honneth as ‘Professor Honneth’ with a condescending tone, and just saying over and over ‘Professor Honneth says X, but he seems not to be familiar with the writings of Y’ (where Y = Jacques Lacan or Mari Matsuda or Evelyn Fox Keller or Donna Haraway). Honneth was stoic, and Geuss had the expected ‘anywhere but here’ look on his face; Lear had a touch of that, but there was still something in his eyes expressive of a kind of curiosity, as he seemingly pondered what sort of archaic trauma would motivate someone to carry on like that.–I can’t shake the thought that Radical Hope will be one of the very few academic books that shall still be read after the coming ecological collapse.

  10. Jonathan was a deeply original, radical, important philosopher, and also a fantastic human being. I never was personally close to him, but our paths crossed often ever since 1974 or so, when we first met in England. We shared an intellectual debt to Bernard Williams, and also a deep fondness for Bernard the man. (When Bernard received an honorary degree from our department in 1999 — while fighting against an eventually terminal cancer — and I hosted an evening reception, I remember how moved and engaged Jonathan was, and how moved I was by his love of Bernard and his loyalty to him.

    Over the years our paths crossed often, not just in departmental matters but also through our shared board membership in the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, where he was the deeply immersed practitioner and I an enthusiastic external supporter. We were partners in commentary: at sessions of the Institute, I commented on drafts of his WISDOM WON THROUGH ILLNESS and he on drafts of my ANGER AND FORGIVENESS. He would push me toward deeper and more subtle engagement with the complexities of the inner world, and I would push him toward acknowledging political forces that co-shape the emotional life. We both learned so much from each other. Later I was honored to be his chosen commentator on IMAGINING THE END, when he presented it at the Seminary Coop, and I am so happy I had that chance to tell him how profoundly important his whole career was — and is, for it is vibrantly alive.

    Beginning with LOVE AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE, Jonathan articulated a new vision of what can be called philosophical psychoanalysis, basically in the Freudian tradition (we argued here too, since my preferred guide is Winnicott) in which love takes center stage, shaping the whole world of the child’s attachments. Unlike so many of the great analysts (for example Klein and Winnicott), he was a beautiful writer, clear and eloquent, and this made it possible for him to communicate his vision to a wide public — for example in his influential 1995 NEW REPUBLIC essay (reprinted in OPEN MINDED) on why Americans have turned away from Freud and why this is a societal loss. This essay becomes ever more timely, as Americans, today even more than then, prefer quick fixes and phony ego-driven narratives and disdain the scary tough work of self-examination.

    Jonathan loved the Greeks, and one should never forget that his first book is a brilliant account of the underpinnings of Aristotle’s formal logic. In his final book, again, Aristotle makes a key appearance, steering us to a correct understanding of gratitude. Jonathan had a wonderful way of uniting apparently heterogeneous sources of inspiration. He wrote with compression as well as eloquence, so each time I reread him I discover insights I had not reckoned with before. He showed what it was to philosophize with love — that is, with your entire soul. The last time I saw him in person was at his marvelous Ryerson Lecture in spring 2024, when he bounded and almost bounced across that formal stage with such infectious joy in both thinking and communicating. I was so happy that in that lecture he integrated the bold political vision of RADICAL HOPE with his psychoanalytic account — all in the light of an Aristotelian understanding of gratitude. Such marvelous intellectual generosity to all who heard him, as to all who read him and will read him for generations to come.

    As to his readers, Jonathan was also superbly generous to colleagues and friends. But his deepest love was clearly reserved for his family. Back in the 1990’s he talked to me about searching for a great love — and then, in Gabriel, he found it. It was beautiful to witness their evident mutual devotion — only made richer by their shared love of Sam (and his ongoing love for Sophia, born from his first marriage). My thoughts are with them in this time of mourning. For all too brief a time, they shared life with a truly wonderful human being.

  11. The Point has put together an extended tribute to Jonathan Lear featuring reminiscences from some of his colleagues, students and friends:

    https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/jonathan-lear-1948-2025/

  12. Professor Lear was kind enough to let me enroll in his graduate seminar on Kierkegaard when I was only an undergraduate. Part of my pitch for joining the class was that I had recently completed a self-directed project in Denmark, studying Kierkegaard on the 200th anniversary of the Danish philosopher’s birth. Although I left it out of my messages to Professor Lear, the truth was that I had felt that my project had mostly failed. (I learned the hard way that no one in Copenhagen was much interested in meeting with a random 20-year-old American to discuss philosophy.)

    The seminar was a great treat. Jonathan treated me as a peer–not only to the graduate students in the seminar–but also to himself. At the onset, he made a convincing case that the title of the work “Philosophical Fragments” was really best translated as “Philosophical Crumbs,” and then promised us all that we would be dining on crumbs for the remainder of the quarter. His obsession with Kierkegaard was infectious. I remember him playfully admitting that it was pretty odd for him to be so deeply immersed in what was essentially Protestant theology, but also explaining how much value he nevertheless found in reenacting Kierkegaard’s philosophical struggles.

    When I was in Denmark, I had seen a silk tie emblazoned with Kierkegaard’s handwriting, a pricey object that made philosophy into a souvenir. I mentioned the tie to Jonathan off-handedly; probably saying something cynical about an eager commercial embrace of a strange thinker to make a quick buck. To my surprise, the next time the class met, Jonathan showed up wearing the tie. He began the class with an announcement personally thanking me for informing him about the existence of tie, which he said he had rushed out to find and buy, and now considered a prized possession.

    What to me had been only an object to be derided, Jonathan transformed into a moment of community. Instead of emulating Kierkegaard’s penchant for dreariness, Jonathan instead found a way to celebrate. That taught me more than anything I had learned by pilgriming to Kierkegaard’s grave.

    1. What a lovely reminiscence!

  13. […] Kaufman on In Memoriam: Jonathan Lear (1948-2025) (UPDATED; ORIGINALLY POSTED 9/22/25)October 29, […]

  14. It is strange to me to write a memorial for Jonathan. I have not spoken with him since before the turn of the millennium, and I exchanged ideas with him only for a year, 1993-4. Yet Jonathan made a difference in my life. As an undergraduate in Yale’s philosophy department in the early 1990s, I wanted to write my senior thesis with him. But around the time that he stepped down as interim chair of a stunningly dysfunctional department and the department went into receivership (with Psychology, of all ironies), he was accepting no senior thesis students.
    But the department’s dysfunction was my luck, as I decided to stay an extra year in New Haven over more tantalizing post-college options. The purpose was simply to sit in on his and Karsten Harries’ seminars. To work with some full professors and see if things stuck. Jonathan welcomed me into his course on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in the Fall of 1993, and the experience changed my thinking.
    I was pushing a line of argument that the theoretical life can be seen as a kind of depth politics, that is, that the theoretical life could be read to address the failures of conventional politics and thus not be an inconsistent other-worldly life at the end of the story of how to be a flourishing citizen. This reading amounted to pointing Aristotle both back toward one origin – Plato – and ahead toward a convoluted legacy – Critical Theory. Jonathan was initially quite skeptical, and there was one seminar meeting where our argument spread through the time of the group.
    The next morning as I walked to open the Daily Caffé, one of my three jobs that year, I heard my name called behind me with enthusiasm. Startled, I turned to see Jonathan, who had just come from a morning swim at the Yale gym. He said he had thought about our argument overnight, then during his swim, and now agreed with me. Not the agreement, but the willingness to live philosophy with his class is what stuck with me. That professors see students and think their best thoughts through is a cause for hope in humankind.
    Jonathan wanted me to TA his course on Freud the next semester, but the Yale department had limits on a non-grad-student TA’ing. I sat in and found myself pushing a Kierkegaardian critique of the therapeutic encounter. That, at the time, did not end well for our relationship. But Jonathan had recommended me to the University of Chicago, and we both arrived there the following year.
    I spoke with Jonathan only once during my time at Chicago, passing in the street. He was friendly and acted as if time had not missed a beat. We discussed lakeshore trains (I don’t remember why) and trains of thought, and that was it. But when Radical Hope came out, I recommended it to Allen Thompson for what is now a well-known article in environmental philosophy, just as Jonathan’s work has become at home there, “Radical Hope for Living Well in a Warming World.”
    I found Jonathan mercurial, but his thinking was significant and poetic. I wish the good for his kids and family in this most silent of times.

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