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The work of Jonathan Lear is a serious attempt at integration between two disciplines, Anglo-American analytic philosophy and psychoanalysis. Finding a synthesis between the traditions is part of his own development as a practitioner of both disciplines. However, the form of integration put forward here is not simply a juxtaposition of two grand traditions. Rather, it is an attempt to find what is missing in each tradition before new and possible solutions can be found. In this respect, synthesis is transformation in Lear's work. This is an ambitious and legitimate project and Lear is up to it. The problem for this reviewer is whether he is going to be bold enough. Let us now go to the pretext, context, and text of Lear's new book, Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life.
It was written in response to the invitation to give the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, in the academic year 1999-2000. This context as to where and why these lectures were given is important to Lear. Cambridge was the place where he discovered that philosophy was to be an active, integral part of his life; it was not simply the product of what other scholars thought. There, he discovered that philosophy was “an activity of the soul” (p. 184).
Context and pretext are, however, connected, and we get a glimpse of their implicit interdigitation when Lear pays a debt to Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche as follows: “We owe them the idea that the history of psychoanalysis can be read as a history of the resistance to its own insight” (p. 167). I foreground this footnote buried at the back of the book to make more explicit Lear's pretext and project, which he began to develop in his previous work, Open Minded (1999), and here expands on and extends. Lear brings together his two loves, philosophy and