About this episode
Jonny Thakkar discusses his late mentor Jonathan Lear and his unique career path in philosophy and psychoanalysis.
My guest on the show today is Jonny Thakkar . Jonny is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Swarthmore College and one of the founding editors of The Point. He’s the author of various articles, most recently “Beyond Equality” in the newest issue of the Point, and the 2018 book Plato as Critical Theorist. I asked Jonny on to talk about his late friend and mentor the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, who was his advisor at the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought and, as you’ll hear in our discussion, his occasional advisor on matters of the heart. He wrote about Lear, after his death, along with a collection of other remembrances from friends and colleagues of Lear’s: His own career path was so individual as to be impossible to emulate. Institutionally speaking, he had completed two undergraduate degrees, one in history and the other in philosophy, followed by two graduate degrees, the first a Ph.D. on Aristotle’s logic under the supervision of Saul Kripke—a prodigy in contemporary logic and metaphysics who was only eight years older than Jonathan, had no expertise in Aristotle and only ever supervised one other dissertation—and the second a…
People in this episode
Host: Daniel Oppenheimer
Guest: Jonny Thakkar
Topics covered
- philosophy
- psychoanalysis
- mentorship
- political science
- personal reflection
Keywords
- Jonathan Lear
- Jonny Thakkar
- philosophy
- psychoanalysis
- mentorship
- Swarthmore College
- The Point
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Swarthmore College, The Point
Books & works: Plato as Critical Theorist, Beyond Equality
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