Abstract

Abstract: In the Republic, Socrates famously says that reason should rule because it is wise and has foresight over the whole soul. This paper examines how we might understand the psychoanalytic fate of that claim.

This is a special, one-off lecture organised by the Faculty of Philosophy. Professor Lear is the John U Nef Distinguished Service Professor in Philosophy and the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. He is also a former Fellow of Clare College and a practicing psychoanalyst. He works primarily on philosophical conceptions of the human psyche from Socrates onward but has written on various topics in philosophy and psychoanalysis. His books include Aristotle and Logical Theory (1980), Aristotle: the desire to understand (1988), Love and its place in nature: a philosophical interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis (1990), Open minded: working out the logic of the soul (1998), Freud (2005), Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), and most recently A Case for Irony (2011).