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Faculty & Alumni Books
In 1824 a young Norwegian named Niels Henrik Abel proved conclusively that algebraic equations of the fifth order are not solvable in radicals. In this book Peter Pesic shows what an important event this was in the history of thought. He also presents it as a remarkable human story. Abel was twenty-one when he self-published his proof, and he died five years later, poor and depressed, just before the proof started to receive wide acclaim. Abel's attempts to reach out to the mathematical elite of the day had been spurned, and he was unable to find a position that would allow him to work in peace and marry his fiancé.
But Pesic's story begins long before Abel and continues to the present day, for Abel's proof changed how we think about mathematics and its relation to the real world. Starting with the Greeks, who invented the idea of mathematical proof, Pesic shows how mathematics found its sources in the real world (the shapes of things, the accounting needs of merchants) and then reached beyond those sources toward something more universal. The Pythagoreans' attempts to deal with irrational numbers foreshadowed the slow emergence of abstract mathematics. Pesic focuses on the contested development of algebra--which even Newton resisted--and the gradual acceptance of the usefulness and perhaps even beauty of abstractions that seem to invoke realities with dimensions outside human experience. Pesic tells this story as a history of ideas, with mathematical details incorporated in boxes. The book also includes a new annotated translation of Abel's original proof.
Losing your job can be a gut-wrenching experience, but it doesn't have to be.
Unemployment remains one of the most constant detriments to our futures. Fluctuating economic states, the recent Covid 19 pandemic, and a host of competing factors unbalance the job market. What was once considered stable is suddenly cast aside, often leaving many who thought their positions were secure without work.
Agile Unemployment: Your Guide to Thriving While Out of Work is more than a self-help book. It is a confession and inspiration. Sabina Sulat made her career in the HR field until she received the one message no one wants to hear. Out of work and desperate to get back on her feet, she struggled with conflicting emotions and the growing impacts of being unemployed.
Written with a unique perspective, Agile Unemployment provides the blueprint for successfully navigating all aspects of being out of work, from the financial deficit to the emotional toll.
Yes, losing your job can be harrowing, but it isn't the end. Cast aside your doubts and develop a new mindset to carry you through those down moments and rebuild your life how YOU see fit. Agile Unemployment is your guide to working through the job searching process and learning how to increase your chances of rebuilding your life and finding the job of your dreams.
Turn losing your job into a moment of opportunity. Agile Unemployment is your key to success and unlocking your full potential. Don't let one moment define the rest of your life.
ELECTRIC POWER NO LONGER EXISTS.
After killing guards at a prison camp to prevent mass murder, Thomas finds a way back to his old allies. Together they recruit more to their ranks and begin to threaten the government's power. But when the city's agents strike back and murder a collaborator, Thomas must run again-and revisit his terrible past in order to find his betrayer.
Reckoning with the dangers of our likely future, THE CITY is the explosive followup to the thriller THE COUNTRY.
ELECTRIC POWER NO LONGER EXISTS.
Clinging to authority, remnants of the government bring back horrors from the 20th century. A man who escaped their lies now works for a secret group that plots resistance. As he journeys across the American landscape, he encounters new threats-and new allies. But who does his work ultimately serve?
Reckoning with the dangers of our likely future, THE COUNTRY is the first book in a new series of thrillers.
DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE? is a unique study of the earliest recorded "discourses" of the Buddha, taking an approach that is at once psychological, philosophical, and literary. In a market abundant with how-to books for spiritual practitioners and advice for achieving a happy life by Buddhist masters, this book offers original readings of some of the most powerful of the Buddha's teachings, which take the form of conversations with a wide range of people: disciples, wandering Hindu philosophers, Brahmin white supremacists, ordinary householders, and even a tyrant. It is a book for all literate, thoughtful people who want to read for themselves what the Buddha really said and to understand their own condition better. The book is a series of essays on specific passages from the Buddha's original Discourses, which blossom and buzz when read with careful thought and sensitivity. It is an introduction to the Buddha's radical empiricism for all people who like to read, think, and investigate; and in it the reader will find texts of great literary beauty and philosophical profundity. It is a book for people who might have no interest in becoming Buddhists as well as for advanced practitioners, who will find these readings fresh and invigorating. Readers will come away from this book with a deepened understanding of their own lives, an intimacy with the Buddha's penetrating mind, and a desire for further study of these wonderful texts and, above all, of themselves.
Philosopher Eva Brann describes the concept of doublethink/doubletalk as a flanking approach toward comprehending a pervasively duplex world, a world that sometimes flashes fleeting signs of covert wholeness. In this, her second collection of aphorisms and observations, Brann shines a light on our world--on the way things are--and she does it with characteristic wit and insight.
Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for fifty-seven years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. This is her ninth book with Paul Dry Books.
Featuring a heartfelt foreword from the game's North American localization director, Marcus Lindblom, Baumann's EarthBound is a joyful tornado of history, criticism, and memoir.
Baumann explores the game's unlikely origins, its brilliant creator, its madcap plot, its marketing failure, its cult rise from the ashes, and its intersections with Japanese and American culture, all the while reflecting back on the author's own journey into the terrifying and hilarious world of adults.
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 College
In Feeling Our Feelings, Eva Brann considers what the great philosophers on the passions and feelings have thought and written about them. She examines the relevant work of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Adam Smith, Hume, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, and also includes a chapter on contemporary studies on the brain. Feeling Our Feelings provides a comprehensive look at this pervasive and elusive topic.
'Feeling our feelings' comes from the words a little boy called Zeke said to me some thirty years ago when he was four. I was swinging him in a park in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and not doing it right. 'Swing me higher, ' he said, 'I want to feel my feelings.' The phrase stuck with me; you might say it festered in my mind; it agitated questions: Why do we all want to feel our feelings, so generally that people 'not in touch' with them are thought to be in need of therapy? What feeling was swinging high inducing? Was it an exultation of the body or an exhilaration of the soul? When he wanted to be feeling his feelings, was there a difference between the general feeling, the mere consciousness of being affected, and his particular feelings, the distinguishable affects?--as, when you sing a song, there is a difference between the singing done and the song sung--or is there?--Eva Brann, from her Preface
Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for fifty years. Brann holds an M.A. in Classics and a Ph.D. in Archaeology from Yale University. She is a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal.
In her latest collection of essays and lectures, Homage to Americans, Eva Brann explores the roots and essence of our American ways.
In "Mile-high Meditations," her flight's late departure from the Denver airport prompts a consideration of her manner of waiting (i.e.,"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 Abraham 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 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.
Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for fifty-seven years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include The Logos of Heraclitus, Feeling Our Feelings, Un-Willing, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects, The Music of the Republic, Then and Now, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books).
Fifty years of reading Homer--both alone and with students--prepared Eva Brann to bring the Odyssey and the Iliad back to life for today's readers. In Homeric 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 Odysseus at his side, boldly confronts the angry suitors; Achilles gives way to boundless grief at the death of his friend Patroclus.
Eva Brann demonstrates a way of reading Homer's poems that yields up their hidden treasures. With an alert eye for Homer's extraordinary visual effects and a keen ear for the musicality of his language, she helps the reader see the flickering campfires of the Greeks and hear the roar of the surf and the singing of nymphs. In Homeric Moments, Brann takes readers beneath the captivating surface of the poems to explore the inner connections and layers of meaning that have made the epics the marvel of the ages.
Written with wit and clarity, this book will be of value to those reading the Odyssey and the Iliad for the first time and to those teaching it to beginners.--Library Journal
Homeric Moments is a feast for the mind and the imagination, laid out in clear and delicious prose. With Brann, old friends of Homer and new acquaintances alike will rejoice in the beauty, and above all the humanity, of the epics. --Jacob Howland, University of Tulsa, Author of The Paradox of Political Philosophy
In Homeric Moments, Eva Brann lovingly leads us, as she has surely led countless students, through the gallery of delights that is Homer's poetry. Brann's enthusiasm is as infectious as her deep familiarity with the works is illuminating.--Rachel Hadas
Brann invites us to enter a conversation [about Homer] in which information and formal arguments jostle with appreciations and frank conjectures and surmises to increase our pleasure and deepen the inward dimension of our humanity.--Richard Freis, Millsaps College
For anyone eager to experience the profundity and charm of Homer's great epic poems, Eva Brann's book will serve as a passionate and engaging guide. Brann displays a deep sensitivity to the cadence and flow of Homeric poetry, and the kind of knowing intimacy with its characters that comes from years of teaching and contemplation. Her relaxed but informative approach succeeds in conveying the grandeur of the great Homeric heroes, while making them continually resonate for our own lives. Brann helps us see that this poetry has an urgency for our own era as much as it did for a distant past.--Ralph M. Rosen, University of Pennsylvania, Author of Old Comedy and The Iambographic Tradition
The most enjoyable books about Homer are always written by those who have read and taught him the most. Eva Brann's collection of astute observations, unusual asides, and visual snapshots of the Iliad and the Odyssey reveals a lifelong friendship with the poet, and is as pleasurable as it is informative. Homeric Moments is rare erudition without pedantry, in a tone marked by good sense without levity.--Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Other Greeks and co-author of Who Killed Homer?
Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for fifty years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include The Logos of Heraclitus, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects, The Music of the Republic, Un-Willing, and Then and Now (all published by Paul Dry Books).
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 minds--so, from the outside in. The final essay again describes two ways of world-construing from the outside in--one 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.
Eva Brann is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include Doublethink / Doubletalk, Then & Now, Un-Willing, The Logos of Heraclitus, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects, The Music of the Republic, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books).
My sister and I are driving south toward Graceland in her beat-up red Saturn, both in need of refuge, both running from different things. Her bumper sticker reads "Humanity Is Trying." It's a triple entendre, she explains: Humanity is exhausting. Humanity is struggle. Humanity is doing the best it knows how.
Humanity Is Trying is several books in one. It's a memoir about the love and the loss of a sister and a best friend. It's the story of a series of escape attempts--cowardly, courageous, harmful, and hopeful--experiments in freedom from the stories that limit us. And it's a record of spiritual, intellectual, and emotional growth with the help of friends, psychedelics, art, and spiritual practice.
From Jason Gots, creator of the podcasts Think Again and Clever Creature, comes a philosophical love letter to the slow, messy work of building a life and living with your dreams in the face of reality.
"In this extraordinary meditation, Eva Brann takes us to the fierce core of Heraclitus's vision and shows us the music of his language. The thought and beautiful prose in The Logos of Heraclitus are a delight."--Barry Mazur, Harvard University
"An engaged solitary, an inward-turned observer of the world, inventor of the first of philosophical genres, the thought-compacted aphorism," "teasingly obscure in reputation, but hard-hittingly clear in fact," "now tersely mordant, now generously humane."
Thus Eva Brann introduces Heraclitus--in her view, the West's first philosopher.
The collected work of Heraclitus comprises 131 passages. Eva Brann sets out to understand Heraclitus as he is found in these passages and particularly in his key word, Logos, the order that is the cosmos.
"Whoever is captivated by the revelatory riddlings and brilliant obscurities of what remains of Heraclitus has to begin anew--accepting help, to be sure, from previous readings--in a spirit of receptivity and reserve. But essentially everyone must pester the supposed obscurantist until he opens up. Heraclitus is no less and no more pregnantly dark than an oracle...The upshot is that no interpretation has prevailed; every question is wide open."
Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for fifty-seven years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include Then and Now, Un-Willing, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects, The Music of the Republic, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books).
Millennial Harvest is a unique and most wonderful project. Neither a book of scholarly essays nor solely a collection of poetry, Millennial Harvest interweaves poetry and prose into a continuous personal narrative in the manner of Dante's La Vita Nuova. It does so with a tremendous intellectual scope, a very wide range of references, and an original vision of the evolution of a writer's consciousness, as well as with sharp and memorable portraits of some of the people involved--Simone Weil, Albert Einstein, Erika Mann, and William Carlos Williams, for example. Above all, Millennial Harvest is the autobiography of a beloved, highly gifted, and most unusual man.
For seventy or so years, Charles Bell has been a great thinker and a great teacher and has brought enlightenment and joy to countless others. Like that of many of the great thinker-teachers, a number of Charles' own writings have gone unpublished or are out of print.
Now, for the first time, all his poetic work is brought together, thoroughly revised and in a way that allows each part to be read in relationship to the rest--a boon to all Bell's admirers and to the many admirers who will doubtless spring up, of whom there will be many. Charles' writing makes highly entertaining, indeed gripping, reading and is full of startling insights; and it is often very, very funny.
In the natural science of ancient Greece, music formed the meeting place between numbers and perception; for the next two millennia, Pesic tells us in Music and the Making of Modern Science, "liberal education" connected music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy within a fourfold study, the quadrivium. Peter Pesic argues provocatively that music has had a formative effect on the development of modern science--that music has been not just a charming accompaniment to thought but a conceptual force in its own right.
Pesic explores a series of episodes in which music influenced science, moments in which prior developments in music arguably affected subsequent aspects of natural science. He describes encounters between harmony and fifteenth-century cosmological controversies, between musical initiatives and irrational numbers, between vibrating bodies and the emergent electromagnetism. He offers lively accounts of how Newton applied the musical scale to define the colors in the spectrum; how Euler and others applied musical ideas to develop the wave theory of light; and how a harmonium prepared Max Planck to find a quantum theory that reengaged the mathematics of vibration. Taken together, these cases document the peculiar power of music--its autonomous force as a stream of experience, capable of stimulating insights different from those mediated by the verbal and the visual. An innovative e-book edition available for iOS devices will allow sound examples to be played by a touch and shows the score in a moving line.
"This collection of Eva Brann's is one of the most valuable aids a lover of Plato could have."--Walter Nicgorski, University of Notre Dame
In 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 Platonic dialogues in modern times."--Bruce Foltz, Eckerd College
"It is a wonder and a delight to be led by Eva Brann through the Socratic conversations...Those who do not know the Republic will be initiated into its treasures. Those who believe that it is a great book will understand better what they already know. And all who teach the dialogues will find their souls expanded in the presence of this most generous teacher." --Ann Hartle, Emory University
"In these wonderfully insightful essays, Eva Brann helps us hear the music of Plato's dialogues and join the conversation...I found myself filled with envy for her students and happy, with this book, to now be included among them."--Anthony T. Kronman, Yale University
The title essay of this collection is a miniature masterpiece, one of the most seminal writings of our time on Plato's Republic.--John Sallis, Pennsylvania State University
Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for over fifty years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include The Logos of Heraclitus, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects, Un-Willing, Then and Now, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books).
Natural law, according to Thomas Aquinas, has its foundation in the evidence and operation of natural, human reason. Its primary precepts are self-evident. Awareness of these precepts does not presuppose knowledge of, or even belief in, the existence of God. The most interesting criticisms of Thomas Aquinas's natural-law teaching in modern times have been advanced by the political philosopher Leo Strauss and his followers. The purpose of this book is to show that these criticisms are based on misunderstandings and that they are inconclusive at best. Thomas Aquinas's natural-law teaching is fully rational. It is accessible to man as man.
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 the preface Eva Brann describes her manner of composition: I wrote these thoughts down on about two thousand sheets, two to three thoughts per paper, and I kept them in some used manila envelopes, the earliest of which bore a postmark of 1972.
Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for over fifty years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include The Logos of Heraclitus, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, The Music of the Republic, Un-Willing, Then and Now, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books).
Originally published in 1979, Plato's Dialogue on Friendship is the first book-length interpretation of the Lysis in English, offering both a full analysis and a literal translation of this frequently neglected Platonic dialogue.
David Bolotin interprets the Lysis as an important work in its own right and places it in the context of Plato's other writings. He attempts to show that despite Socrates' apparent failure to discover what a friend is, a coherent understanding of friendship emerges in the Lysis. His commentary follows the dialogue closely, and his interpretation unfolds gradually, as he is providing a detailed summary of the Lysis itself.
Mr. Bolotin's translation captures the playfulness and rich ambiguities of the Lysis and its effectiveness as conversational drama. His book, written with precision and clarity, should be useful to students of political philosophy and ancient philosophy.
