Fifty years of reading Homer—both alone and with students—prepared Eva Brann to bring theOdyssey and the Iliad back to life for today's readers. InHomeric Moments, she brilliantly conveys the unique delights of Homer's epics as she focuses on the crucial scenes, or moments, that mark the high points of the narratives: Penelope and Odysseus, faithful wife and returning husband, sit face to face at their own hearth for the first time in twenty years; young Telemachus, with his father Odysseu...

"Eva Brann has a true aptitude for felicitous expression, and one can feel through her prose the presence of a great and patient teacher."--Dennis L. Sepper, University of Dallas, author of Understanding ImaginationSince ancient times, philosophers have written about "the will." But the will is more than a philosophic and scholarly topic. In our everyday speech, what do we mean when we speak of the "will"? Will-words turn up everyw...

In his Vatican fresco The School of Athens, Raphael portrays the great thinkers and teachers of the ages talking and listening to one another. His Heraclitus, however, is a lone thinker staring downward and inward, seated apart from the other philosophers. According to Eva Brann, Heraclitus looks within: "There he finds the Logos, the order that is the cosmos, the world without, whose mouthpiece and scribe he means to be."The collected work of Heraclitus comprises 131 passages. Som...

Eva Brann, who has taught at St. John’s College, Annapolis, for sixty years, wrote these essays largely as clarifying incitements to students who were reading, or ought to have been reading, the works discussed. In her words:"The first essay looks at the 'Pre-Socratics' Heraclitus and Parmenides. They appear to be in radical opposition, but they are really doing the same, new thing: seeing the world as an intelligible whole. Both observe external nature, construing it in their mind...

"A dazzling wealth of stimulating reflection and wise insight. To read Feeling Our Feelings is to relive one's own early moments of intellectual awakening, with the all the advantages of age and experience. Eva Brann proves to be a most steady and enlightening guide on an inquiry into the relation between life and thought that few have pursued so thoroughly."—Susan Shell, Department of Political Science, Boston CollegeIn Feeling Our Feelings

In her latest book, Eva Brann has collected observations and aphorisms written over more than thirty years. Open Secrets / Inward Prospects divides in a rough but ready way into two sorts: observations about our external world well known to all but not always openly told, and sightings of internal vistas and omens, wherein she looks at herself as a sample soul.Often the aphorisms balance opposing thoughts, as if the writer were—simultaneously—on both ends of the seesaw.In t...

“This collection of Eva Brann’s is one of the most valuable aids a lover of Plato could have.”—Walter Nicgorski, University of Notre DameIn fourteen essays, Eva Brann talks with readers about the conversations Socrates engages in with his fellow Athenians. In doing so, she shows how Plato’s dialogues and the timeless matters they address remain important to us today.The Music of the Republic “will establish [Eva Brann] as one of the great readers and interpreters of the Pla...

"What is the original of an image, whether beheld in the imagination or the world?"Where do the images in our imagination come from? These images, Eva Brann reminds us, are not what they themselves display. They feign or imitate or copy what they seem to stand for. Ms. Brann turns and returns to a consideration of the nature of these images using words, their etymology, and their capacity to prompt image-making in her adventure in tracking down the ultimate source of our i...

"Each aphorism is a tiny well-framed picture which at once observes and questions the world’s workings with its accumulated intellectual pleasures, beauties, and quirks."—Washington Independent Review of Books"At times, aphorisms are merely witty, but they can convey and evoke sustained reflection and thought, as those of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Nicolás Gómez Dávila. To that list we can add Eva Brann...In the few hours spent with her, one finds a wise, slightly acerbic, good-hu...

The Declaration of Independence aimed to turn our continent from a British colony into an American nation. Yet its first, its primary claim, is that we are all individually equal. What’s that got to do with national independence? However, the Declaration’s claim of universal human equality has grown into our primary political passion.This brief book asks: What concrete, substantial good do we get out of this equality? Well, specific safety of our equality before the law. But beyond...

These two long essays make up a short book, one full of depth and knowledge, in which Eva Brann gets at the roots of our thinking—without tearing things apart.ThenIn the first essay, Brann parses out the schema and meaning of Herodotus's The History (The Persian Wars). She writes that Herodotus worked by indirection. Giving a full account of the Persians and the peoples who constituted their empire—and whose empire encircled the Greeks (thus the "Greek center")—Herodotus de...

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fund...