Eva Brann – författare

No, that diminutive but independent vocable, begins its great role early in human life and never loses it. For not only can it head a negative sentence, announcing its judgement, or answer a question, implying its negated content, it can, and mostly does, in the beginning of speech, express an assertion of the resistant will—sometimes just that and nothing more. The adult antiphony to the toddler's incessant no is another no, that of preventive command, and the great commandments of later life continue to be prohibitions: Nine of the Ten Commandments are in the negative. Eva Brann explores nothingness in the third book of her trilogy, which has treated imagination, time and now naysaying. If we want to understand something of imagination, memory and time, she argues, we must mount an inquiry into what it means to say something is not what it claims to be or is not there or is nonexistent or is affected by Nonbeing.

This is an English translation of one of Plato’s great dialogues of Socrates talking about death, dying, and the soul due to his impending execution. Included is an introduction and glossary of key terms.

Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Plato's immediate audience.

Whether readers are tackling the Odyssey and the Iliad for the first time or are already well acquainted with the works of Homer, they will uncover the connections and layers of meaning that have made the epics 'the marvel of the ages' in this scholarly and encouraging resource. The inexhaustible pleasures of Homer are highlighted by focusing on a number of 'Homeric moments' -- crucial scenes from the epics that cast a vivid or hilarious or poignant light on the narratives: Penelope and Odysseus, faithful wife and returning husband, sit face to face in private over the hearth for the first time in 20 years; young Telemachus, with his father Odysseus at his side, boldly faces the angry suitors; Achilles kills Hector, his mirror image, on the battlefield. Whatever the 'clues to delight', these leads take the reader behind the story to reveal hidden treasures in the poetry.

This collection of aphorisms and thoughts gathers 30 years of observations about the external world and on the nature of our internal selves. Compiled from scraps of paper dating from the early 1970s, these bits of wisdom include notes about the world around us that are often thought, but not often said; sightings of internal vistas and omens; and observations on music, the passage of time, America, the body, domesticity, and intimacy.

In her latest collection of essays and lectures, Eva Brann explores the roots and essence of American ways. In "Mile-High Meditations", her flight's late departure from the Denver airport prompts a consideration of her manner of waiting (ie: "being"). As she looks around, she notes (and compares to her own) the ways her fellow travelers pass their time. These observations lead her to wonder how each of us lives with ourselves and how we live together -- and put up with one another. With these questions in mind, the next two essays carefully examine two famous political documents that have shaped American self-understanding: James Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" which is the essential argument for separation of church and state; and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which enlarged and refashioned our understanding of the American political character, first given formal expression in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In "Paradox of Obedience" a lecture originally delivered at the Air Force Academy, Brann considers the puzzling character of obedience in a country dedicated to liberty. The concluding piece, "The Empire of the Sun and the West," takes us to Aztec Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest. What allowed Cortes and his handful of men to overcome a great empire? In pursuit of an answer, Brann describes a human type whose fulfillment she sees in the American Character.

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. Some scholars consider them fragments, or even paraphrases of or additions to what Heraclitus originally wrote. Rather than focus on these puzzles of historical scholarship, Eva Brann sets herself the task to understand the thought of Heraclitus as it is found in the passages themselves. Read her account to see why she thinks that "Heraclitus was the first Westerner to ponder how thought and world come to jibe: A Logos that we can hear must be the designer -- and the design -- of the world.

Since 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 everywhere in the English language. We make wills. We exert our willpower. We are wilful at times but merely willing at others. Above all, will is there a hundred times a day, when we use the auxiliary verb "will" to express our intentions or expectations for the future, or simply to indicate the future tense. Yet it takes only a moment's reflection to see that there's a tremendous range of meaning here, and so something to think about. Moreover, all of us have wondered now and then, probably both as children and as adults, whether we are really free, and whether being free means being able to do what we want or being free of wants and desires or something else entirely. That is, we have all wrestled with the issue of free will in our informal, non-scholarly ways. Finally, we have probably all asked ourselves whether people who talk about will and willpower are all talking about the same thing or even talking sense. These are among the issues that Eva Brann puts at the centre of Un-Willing. She takes the whole range of questions about the will that are implicit in our everyday lives and everyday thinking, articulates them, shows us how they have been dealt with within the philosophic tradition and contemporary scientific thought -- and then wrestles with them herself.

Eva Brann, who has been teaching at St. Johns 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 mindsso, from the outside in. The final essay again describes two ways of world-construing from the outside inone by penetrating the surface of reality, the other by spinning a web of complexity over it. The five essays in between focus on works by Kant and display the world as constituted from the human inside out. An appreciative review of the Critique of Pure Reason shows how Kant brilliantly justifies a science of nature by making nature itself the construct of our understanding. But he leads us to the abyss of more idealism; externality and realism escape him. The explication of his one absolute moral commandment similarly defines his morality entirely in terms divorced from objective good and concentrated on internal integrity. Finally, his huge unpublished legacy agonizes about bringing a god, first conceived as an inner need, into external existence.

"As iron filings configure themselves around a magnet, so these essays display Eva Branns form of oppositional, or polar, thinking. To introduce her book, Eva Brann calls up the image of Iron Filings as they "settle themselves along the lines of force that form a field of influence around a bar magnet that has itself been allowed to settle itself in its natural direction. The whole configuration makes, by natures wit, a suggestive figure for the thinking mind -- at least of a cross-section in its life." So these essays range from Ms. Branns thoughts "Of God, "Of Novels, "Of Booklessness, to, well, a surprising diversity of topics which comes, unsurprisingly to completion with an essay "Of Endings. Eva Brann thinks a thought and then thinks a thought somewhat on the other side of the first thought -- hence the display of thought like iron filings around two ends of a magnet.