Prof. Jonathan Lear, a renowned philosopher and psychoanalyst whose writings examined and shaped fundamental questions related to human flourishing and the making of meaning, died Sept. 22 at the age of 76.
A globally respected University of Chicago scholar of the human psyche, Lear explored foundational questions surrounding what it means to be human—touching on love, death, morality, irony, mourning, hope, and gratitude with his customary wit and clarity.
A member of the UChicago faculty for nearly 30 years, Lear was remembered as a devoted scholar, mentor and friend by colleagues across UChicago and the academic world.
“Few have exemplified the ethos of the University of Chicago as well as Jonathan,” said President Paul Alivisatos. “His commitment to close reading and listening was complemented by his profound ability to marshal diverse evidence and ideas to brilliant effect. Jonathan was an inspiration and guide to UChicago citizens at all levels, from students to faculty and to me, personally, as president. He was a force that helped to bind us, always calling us to reach further and deepen our understanding.”
Lear’s wide-ranging scholarship began with major contributions to the interpretation of Aristotle’s logic; his book, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (1988), has become an essential introduction to the ancient philosopher for generations of students.
His study of ancient ethics convinced him of the need for a more adequate theory of the human mind, and led him to become a fully trained clinical psychoanalyst. Lear’s clinical experience subsequently shaped his original, field-defining scholarship on Freud, and informed his influential readings of Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger.
“Jonathan Lear was a brilliant and unclassifiable philosopher,” said Richard Moran, the Brian D. Young Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. “Among his many accomplishments, it is he, more than any other philosopher of his generation, who brought Freud and psychoanalysis into contemporary philosophical discussion, not only on the level of theoretical reconstruction, but also in the examination of the good life, and the crises that threaten to disable the psyche.”
“Jonathan Lear’s deep and wide-ranging work, integrating philosophical and psychoanalytic ideas, is unparalleled in the history of psychoanalysis,” said Kay Long, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. “His unique combination of mental flexibility, imagination, and ability to forge new concepts while honoring the old led him to original, fresh interpretations of key psychoanalytic concepts, such as free association and gratitude.”
The John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy, Lear faithfully served the UChicago community in a variety of roles, including as the inaugural Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society from 2014-2022 and as a member of the Laboratory Schools Board since 2023.
UChicago President Emeritus Hanna Holborn Gray called Lear’s commitment to the institutional culture of UChicago “unparalleled.”
“As one of its leading scholars and citizens, he served and contributed significantly, whenever asked,” said Gray. “He was exemplary in his openness, toleration, good will, and courtesy toward all with whom he agreed or disagreed. For him, it was the quality of the question, and the substantive quality of the argument, that mattered.”
Lear deeply loved the University of Chicago, listing it among history’s greatest institutions alongside Plato’s Academy. During his 2009 Aims of Education address to incoming College students, he praised the University’s culture of conversation and courageous thinking.
“There is no place I would rather be,” he said.
‘The ideal of truth-seeking’
Lear was born in 1948 in New York. He graduated cum laude from Yale University in 1970 where he studied history. He then studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge (BPhil, 1973; AM,1976) and at Rockefeller University (PhD, 1978). He trained as a psychoanalyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.
Before UChicago, he taught at Yale and Cambridge. While Lear was teaching at Yale in the early 1990s, Prof. Robert Pippin, then chair of the Committee on Social Thought, had become intrigued by his strikingly original philosophical interpretations of Freud and set out to recruit him.
“Love and Its Place in Nature had come out—really fine, interesting revisionary work on Freud—and I got in touch with him and asked if there'd be any chance he would be interested in coming to Chicago,” recounted Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy. “He was interested.”
Lear arrived at UChicago in 1996, continuing to practice psychoanalysis out of his office on the fifth floor of Foster Hall.
Throughout his nearly three decades at UChicago, Lear taught classes that reflected his wide-ranging interests. He relished the opportunity for co-teaching with fellow philosophers as well as with the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee and the poet Mark Strand, both colleagues in the Committee on Social Thought.
Former student Amy Levine, PhD’24, recounted taking Lear’s lecture course on philosophy and psychoanalysis, which she said, “genuinely changed my life.”
“This class opened up a set of topics and questions for me that I did not know I was allowed to think about as a professional philosopher,” said Levine, a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
Among his many honors, Lear was a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Lear was a prominent public intellectual, known for his clear, accessible writing, despite the heft of his ideas.
“He had this extraordinary gift, a way of giving light, where he could encapsulate the most difficult, demanding ideas with absolute clarity, with ease of expression, and with real intellectual joy,” said Assoc. Prof. Timothy Harrison, a UChicago colleague and friend who also audited three of Lear’s classes.
“Jonathan embodied the ideal of truth-seeking,” said Richard Levin, president emeritus of Yale University. “Relentless, rigorous and open-minded, he led us all to new insights about everything he studied. When I think of what is most valuable in our universities, of what is most essential to defend, I think of Jonathan.”
‘A commitment to meaningfulness’
Throughout his career, Lear continually bridged the gap between ancient minds and our contemporary world. In his 2006 book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Lear meditated on the words of Chief Plenty Coups of the Apsáalooke, also known as the Crow Nation, who had witnessed the loss of his people’s way of life: “After this, nothing happened.”
Spending time on the Apsáalooke Reservation in Montana, Lear grappled with an ethical problem relevant to all of humanity: Our ability to understand ourselves and what we are doing depends on the concepts of the cultures we inhabit; How do we live well in the face the possibility that those cultures may be destroyed?
“It has become a book for our times,” Pippin said, “when the possibility of hope in the future seems an ever more difficult possibility.”
One of Lear’s proudest accomplishments as Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society was to facilitate collaboration between UChicago faculty and Native scholars and artists. This culminated in the landmark 2020 exhibition Apsáalooke Women and Warriors, held jointly between the Neubauer Collegium and the Field Museum of Natural History. It was the first large-scale exhibition curated by a Native American in the Field Museum’s history.
His ideas on the future, the end of life and purpose as we know it were encapsulated in his final book, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (2022). In it, he expounds the importance of mourning and gratitude—ideas he also illuminated in his 2024 Ryerson Lecture, titled “Gratitude, Mourning, Hope and Other Forms of Thought.”
“We do not know when or how we will die,” Lear said. “Gratitude, I want to say, is a way of making a commitment to meaningfulness—that this gift has mattered, and that it shall continue to matter in the midst of a life that we cannot fully comprehend.”
‘There was no one else like him’
Lear mentored a generation of scholars, many of whom found themselves drawn to the University by the power of his intellectual reputation, commitment to deep questioning and encouragement of others to do the same.
“Jonathan had a kind of electricity about him, an energy in his eyes,” said Lear’s former student Jonny Thakkar, PhD’13, an associate professor in political science at Swarthmore College. “He was irrepressibly idealistic about the life of the mind, and when you caught his gaze, you felt called to live up to his ideals.”
“As a prospective Ph.D. student interested in philosophy and psychoanalysis, I of course wanted to attend the University of Chicago,” said former student Francey Russell, PhD’17, an assistant professor of philosophy at Barnard College, “and I of course wanted to work with Jonathan. There was no one else like him.”
As a mentor, Levine described Lear as “honest and challenging, although unfailingly patient and supportive.” Colleague and frequent co-instructor Prof. Matthew Boyle wrote that one of Lear’s most striking qualities was helping others discover 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,” said Boyle, the Emerson and Grace Wineland Pugh Professor of Humanities. “His generosity of interest helped many people find their voices.”
For the last eight years, Lear has served as a mentor, advisor and chair of Emma Eigen's Ph.D. dissertation committee.
“He knew how difficult it can be to write, even to think,” she said. “But he also knew, and communicated to me, that this difficulty is not the true material with which we work. The true material is joy. There was a kind of brightness in what he did, a shine, a suppleness, an energy. As he wrote in one of his last emails to me: 'I am writing again, and that makes me happy.”
A “great raconteur,” according to his many friends, Lear had a fondness for Bob Dylan, a gin martini and sharing joyful stories.
“I've not laughed longer and harder with anyone than with Jonathan,” Pippin said. “He was a person who really appreciated the importance of keeping in touch, of cultivating a friendship. I'm really grateful for having known him for all these years.”
Lear is survived by his wife, Gabriel Richardson Lear, the Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in Western Civilization in Philosophy and in the Committee on Social Thought; his children, Sophia and Samuel; and his sister, Judith Lear.
A memorial service will be held at a later date.
