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. He was educated at Yale, Cambridge, and the Rockefeller University. Before coming to Chicago, Professor Lear taught at Cambridge, where he was a fellow and director of studies in philosophy at Clare College, and at Yale where he was the Kingman Brewster Professor of the Humanities. During the time he was teaching at Yale, Lear trained as a psychoanalyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.