Philosophy
University of Chicago

Shame and Courage at the Collapse of Civilization

A culture will typically educate its members from childhood about what acts are shameful and which are courageous. But it is these very standards that come into question when a way of life becomes threatened. For those who have the historical bad luck to live through such a period, what are appropriate ways of finding one’s bearings? This is an extraordinarily difficult question to answer because at such a time the standard modes of practical reasoning will themselves be in question. Jonathan Lear shows how a philosophical and psychoanalytic perspective can make crucial contributions to our understanding of how we construct, change, and live with basic values.

Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where he is a member of the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy. Professor Lear is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and an internationally known speaker. He is the author of Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (2003), Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (2000), Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (1998), Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1990), and other works.