Jonathan Lear died Sept 22, 2025. He was the John U.
Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. From 2014 to 2022, Lear served as the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. He led projects that pushed scholars from different fields to work together. He wanted them to wrestle with culture and society instead of working in silos.
His scholarship occupied a specific ground. He was a philosopher trained as a psychoanalyst or a psychoanalyst who thought like a philosopher.
Lear spent his career pulling apart how humans make sense of themselves. He did not settle for the surface. Instead, he dug into the underlying dynamics of thought and behavior and the messy stuff driving perception and experience.
The Committee on Social Thought provided him a home. This peculiar and demanding institution allows faculty to roam across history, literature, philosophy, and politics without sticking to one department.
Lear’s teaching and writing reflected a refusal to treat human experience as understandable from a single angle. He believed big questions required multiple lenses. The blend of disciplines gave his work a specific weight.
It was dense and complex. It was not for the casual reader.
His death represents the loss of a specific kind of intellectual energy. Universities are full of specialists digging deep into narrow ditches. Lear was a specialist in the connections between those ditches.
He showed that psychoanalysis and philosophy, which are often separate, could illuminate each other. This cross-pollination is hard to sustain.
It requires someone who commands respect in both fields and can translate without betraying the source. Under his direction, the Neubauer Collegium tried to institutionalize this process. Lear funded research groups, brought in visiting scholars, and hosted conversations that did not fit a single academic conference.
He picked the projects and set the tone. He pushed for a richer understanding of culture as a living force shaping society rather than a museum artifact.
His legacy rests on the institutions he shaped and the scholars he trained. The Committee on Social Thought and the Neubauer Collegium still operate. However, the person who held those two roles together and understood what each could give the other is gone. The University of Chicago must now find someone else who can hold the tension between disciplines.
This is not a simple search. Lear leaves behind a body of scholarly work.
His books and articles remain on library shelves and in digital archives. But the live, in-person work of building intellectual bridges between philosophy and psychoanalysis, and between the university and broader culture, stops with him. Someone else will have to pick it up.
Whether they can do it with the same depth and range remains an open question.
