In this brilliant book, Jonathan Lear argues that Freud posits love as a basic force in nature, one that makes individuation -- the condition for psychological health and development -- possible. Love is active not just in the development of the individual but also in individual analysis and indeed [...]

In this fully revised and updated second edition, Jonathan Lear clearly introduces and assesses all of Freud's thought, focusing on those areas of philosophy on which Freud is acknowledged to have had a lasting impact. These include the philosophy of mind, free will and determinism, rationality, the[...]

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 behaviour in terms of a higher principle - whether happiness or death - the pictures fall apart. A[...]

In 2001, Vanity Fair declared that the Age of Irony was over. Joan Didion has lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama has become an "irony-free zone." Jonathan Lear in his 2006 book Radical Hope looked into America's heart to ask how might we dispose ourselves if we came to feel o[...]