Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life
Book Details
- Publisher : Harvard U.P.
- Published : September 2024
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 176
- Category :
Culture and Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 96638
- ISBN 13 : 9780674297333
- ISBN 10 : 0674297334
Also by Jonathan Lear
Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life
Price £42.95
Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and...
Price £39.95
Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul
Price £44.95
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Jonathan Lear is one of the most distinctive intellectual voices in America, a philosopher and psychoanalyst who draws from ancient
and modern thought, personal history, and everyday experience to help us think about how we can flourish, or fail to, in a world of flux
and finitude that we only weakly control. His range is on full display in Imagining the End as he explores seemingly disparate concerns to
challenge how we respond to loss, crisis, and hope.
He considers our bewilderment in the face of planetary catastrophe. He examines the role of the humanities in expanding our imaginative and emotional repertoire. He asks how we might live with the realization that cultures, to which we traditionally turn for solace, are themselves vulnerable. He explores how mourning can help us thrive, the role of moral exemplars in shaping our sense of the good, and the place of gratitude in human life. Along the way, he touches on figures as diverse as Aristotle, Abraham Lincoln, Sigmund Freud, and the British royals Harry and Meghan.
Written with Lear’s characteristic elegance, philosophical depth, and psychological perceptiveness, Imagining the End is a powerful meditation on persistence in an age of turbulence and anxiety.
Reviews and Endorsements
Imagining the End suggests, in a sober yet hopeful spirit, how mourning, rightly understood, can give meaning to our lives in the disenchanted times in which we find ourselves. In exploring the hopes that have failed us, the projects that have run into the sand, the loves we have lost, the attachments that have come to an end—a work of what amounts to creative mourning—we can develop a stance in the here
and how from which the psyche can look outward and flourish.
J. M. Coetzee
Lear is a lovely and subtle writer, someone who has a rare capacity to introduce ways of seeing and interrogating the world that dignify our
confusion and pain while also opening up new possibilities for moving forward.
Daniel Oppenheimer, Washington Post
About the Author(s)
Jonathan Lear is John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor on the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His works include Wisdom Won from Illness, Radical Hope, A Case for Irony, and Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life.
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