Bøker av Jonathan Lear

A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction A Chronicle of Higher Education Best Scholarly Book "Imagining the End suggests, in a sober yet hopeful spirit, how mourning, rightly understood, can give meaning to our lives in the disenchanted times in which we find ourselves. In exploring the hopes that have failed us, the projects that have run into the sand, the loves we have lost, the attachments that have come to an end--a work of what amounts to creative mourning--we can develop a stance in the here and how from which the psyche can look outward and flourish. "--J. M. Coetzee "Lear is a lovely and subtle writer, someone who has a rare capacity to introduce ways of seeing and interrogating the world that dignify our confusion and pain while also opening up new possibilities for moving forward."-Daniel Oppenheimer, Washington Post Jonathan Lear is one of the most distinctive intellectual voices in America, a philosopher and psychoanalyst who draws from ancient and modern thought, personal history, and everyday experience to help us think about how we can flourish, or fail to, in a world of flux and finitude that we only weakly control. His range is on full display in Imagining the End as he explores seemingly disparate concerns to challenge how we respond to loss, crisis, and hope. He considers our bewilderment in the face of planetary catastrophe. He examines the role of the humanities in expanding our imaginative and emotional repertoire. He asks how we might live with the realization that cultures, to which we traditionally turn for solace, are themselves vulnerable. He explores how mourning can help us thrive, the role of moral exemplars in shaping our sense of the good, and the place of gratitude in human life. Along the way, he touches on figures as diverse as Aristotle, Abraham Lincoln, Sigmund Freud, and the British royals Harry and Meghan. Written with Lear's characteristic elegance, philosophical depth, and psychological perceptiveness, Imagining the End is a powerful meditation on persistence in an age of turbulence and anxiety.

"A fascinating mixture of traditional psychoanalytic thinking with clinical strategies that even today would be considered creative and controversial, The Fifty-Minute Hour has never failed to capture the imagination. . . . No student's education in psychotherapy is complete without reading this book. Decades after its original publication, it still stands as a pioneering landmark in the history of psychotherapy."-John Suler

Written by Jonathan Lear, The Monkey-Proof Box: Curriculum design for building knowledge, developing creative thinking and promoting independence is a manifesto on how to dismantle the curriculum we're told to deliver and construct in its place the curriculum we need to deliver.

Can reason absorb the psyche's nonrational elements into a conception of the fully realized human being? Without a good answer to that question, Jonathan Lear says, philosophy is cut from its moorings in human life. He brings into conversation psychoanalysis and moral philosophy, which together form a basis for ethical thought about how to live.

Guerrilla Teaching is a revolution. Not a flag-waving, drum-beating revolution, but an underground revolution, a classroom revolution. It's not about changing policy or influencing government; it's about doing what you know to be right, regardless of what you're told.

Vanity Fair has declared the Age of Irony over. Joan Didion has lamented that Obama's United States is an "irony-free zone." Here Jonathan Lear argues that irony is one of the tools we use to live seriously, to get the hang of becoming human. It forces us to experience disruptions in our habitual ways of tuning out of life, but comes with a cost.

Expanding on philosophical conceptions of love, nature, and mind, Lear shows that love can cure because it is the force that makes us human.

Everywhere we look in contemporary culture, knowingness has taken the place of thought. This book is a spirited assault on that deadening trend, especially as it affects our deepest attempts to understand the human psyche-in philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Separated by millennia, Aristotle and Sigmund Freud gave us disparate but compelling pictures of the human condition. But if, with Jonathan Lear, we scrutinize these thinkers' attempts to explain human behavior in terms of a higher principle-whether happiness or death-the pictures fall apart.

Aristotle was one of the greatest logicians. He not only devised the first system of formal logic, he also raised many fundamental problems in the philosophy of logic. Dr Lear shows how Aristotle's discussion of logical consequence, validity and proof can contribute to topical debates in the philosophy of logic. No background knowledge of Aristotle is assumed.

Plenty Coups, last great Chief of the Crow Nation, said, "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened." In Lear's view, this story raises an ethical question that challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one's culture might collapse?