Jonathan Lear

What is the appropriate relation of human reason to the human psyche--indeed, to human life--taken as a whole? The essays in this volume range over literature and ethics, psychoanalysis, social theory, and ancient Greek philosophy. But, from different angles, they all address this question. Wisdom Won from Illness probes deep into the heart of psychoanalysis to understand how it illuminates the human condition. At the same time it goes back to the origins of psychological thinking in ancient Greece--and the effort to understand the ethical life of human beings. It examines the continuing travails of the Crow Nation in its efforts to find ways to live after cultural catastrophe. It probes the deep meaning of Kierkegaard's irony. It also considers two of the great writers of our time--John Coetzee and Marilynne Robinson--and their use of literature to change the human mind. Socrates thought reason should rule over the whole psyche; but much hangs on what we might mean by this claim. We humans have inflicted unimaginable suffering on each other, justified by arrogant conceptions of reason, and of ruling. The same is true of our treatment of other animals. False images of reason regularly blind us to the claims and reality of others. One way to react to all this pain and destruction is to denounce the very idea of reason as nothing more than an ideological tool of power. This book argues that is the wrong way to go. We should not be too quick to dismiss our real human capacities just because they have so often been put to such poor uses. The essays in this book aim to offer a philosophical anthropology and psychology that is adequate to who we are--and who we might legitimately hope to become.--

To understand the weird intelligibility of irrational acts, we must account for the immanence of irrationality to mind. Traditional approaches which divide the mind into mindlike parts enter the problem at the wrong level: the level of configurations of propositional attitudes. But as in the case of Freud's Rat Man who interprets his irrationality as a case of akrasia in this sense, such approaches presuppose too much rationality in order to capture the phenomenon of irrationality. An explanation must rather enter at the level of the inner structures of mental attitudes and of the possible mental operations on that inner structure – i. e. at the level of non-rational mental activities like „phantasy“ in which the restlessness of mind expresses itself. It is intrinsic to the very idea of mind that mind must sometimes be irrational: it has a tendency to disrupt its own rational functioning.

This paper is an investigation of Plato’s thought that the disruptive force of Eros can lead us in a good direction. It takes seriously Diotima’s teaching to Socrates that the erotic encounter with the beautiful beloved stimulates a pregnancy in the lover. This paper argues that Plato did not, and we should not, think of this pregnancy merely as a metaphor or an allegory. The paper also argues that we misread Diotoma’s account of erotic ascent if we think of the lover as coming to disdain his first loves, the beautiful body or the beautiful individual. What he comes to disdain is the thought that this could be the ultimate telos of his quest. But the beloved, or the memory of the beloved, in all his or her corporeality remains of crucial importance throughout the lover’s life. Giving birth in the beautiful—however creative the act—occurs in the aura of the beloved. The paper then takes these Platonic ideas and investigates them in relation to a fantasy-pregnancy that was long suppressed in the history of psychoanalysis: that of the patient known as Anna O. giving birth to her doctor’s baby. The paper argues that this should be understood as a pregnancy of soul—one that played a significant role in giving birth to psychoanalysis itself.

Siamo creature che hanno bisogno di dare senso alle cose. Non si tratta sol­tanto di un’importante esigenza psicologica, ma di una condizione per poter es­sere chi siamo. Ma a quali condizioni le cose possono avere senso? Un mo­do per studiare l’intelligibilità – la possibilità, cioè, che le cose abbiano sen­so – consiste nel prendere in considerazione quelle situazioni in cui l’in­telligibilità sembra venire meno. Comprendendo queste condizioni-limite – quan­do e perché le cose smettono di avere senso – possiamo forse capire da che cosa dipenda l’intelligibilità. I membri della nazione indiana dei crow spe­rimentarono qualcosa di simile a un crollo del significato, dopo il loro in­gresso nella riserva. Analizzare la loro toccante vicenda può aiutarci a ca­pire meglio che cosa significhi essere privati di un mondo.We are creatures who need to make sense of things. This is not just an im­por­tant psychological need; it is a condition of who we are. But what are the conditions of the possibility of things making sense? One way to study in­telligibility – the possibility of things making sense – is to consider si­tua­tions in which intelligibility seems to break down. In coming to understand the­se limit conditions – when and why things no longer make sense – we can perhaps grasp that on which the intelligibility of things depends. The mem­­bers of the crow nation of Indians experienced something like a break­down of meaning, after they moved into the reservation. By examining their poignant story, we can understand better what it is to be deprived of a world

Timothy Smiley has made ground-breaking contributions to modal logic, free logic, multiple-conclusion logic, and plural logic. He has illuminated Aristotle’s syllogistic, the ideas of logical form and consequence, and the distinction between assertion and rejection, and has worked to debunk the theory of descriptions. This volume brings together new articles by an international roster of leading logicians and philosophers in order to honour Smiley’s work. Their essays will be of significant interest to those working across the logical spectrum—in philosophy of language, philosophical and mathematical logic, and philosophy of mathematics.