Abstract

Jonathan Lear, member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, psychoanalyst, and author of works on Aristotle’s logic and epistemology and a philosophical interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis, has compiled a collection of 12 essays, all but three previously published, reflective of his varied training and talents. The essays themselves range from a piece in The New Republic on the “Freud-bashing” that led to the cancellation of the Library of Congress’s exhibition “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture” late in 1995 to fairly technical pieces written for the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Phronesis, and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Original dates of publication range widely as well, from 1984 to 1996, and would seem to mark the author’s intellectual pilgrimage, outlined in his Preface: from the preserves of analytic philosophy, often identified by him with professional philosophy simpliciter, to the more “open-minded” concern with the history of philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis. He contrasts his own concern with the Platonic problem, “giving a logos of the psyche” or “working out the logic of the soul,” to the computationism of modern psychology departments and to “ersatz philosophy.” Ersatz philosophy is exemplified, in his interpretation by Oedipus’ thoughtless, self-oblivious argumentation which, according to a footnote, may count its “modern descendants in verificationism, Popperianism, ordinary-language philosophy”. In a passage that explains the book’s title, Lear affirms the truth that he believes Socrates’ life represented: “that we have the capacity to be open minded: the capacity to live nondefensively with the question of how to live”.