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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.
Since art is essential to the love of one's neighbor as oneself and to love's chief goal of building up one another, we cannot understand love without also understanding its art. Observing that praise is ubiquitous in Søren Kierkegaard's writings, Richard McCombs interprets Kierkegaard's Works of Love as a eulogy of love's arts of forgiveness, peace-making, and building up one's neighbor in maturity and charity. Kierkegaard stresses love's ability to achieve results, calling love irresistible and almost magical in overcoming obstacles to its purposes; living the life of faith and love involves skillful attention to the specificity of the episodes in an individual's life, and the creative imagining of new ways of enacting these virtues. McCombs argues that Kierkegaard's ideas about the art of love reveal limits or exceptions to his individualism and to his anti-consequentialism in ethics. Art and Praise in Kierkegaard's Works of Love explores Kierkegaard's distinct praises of love through texts like Works of Love, The Brothers Karamazov, and Middlemarch to illustrate, complement, and sometimes correct Kierkegaard's profound account of love's art and wisdom, suggesting ways that the art of praise bears on other questions in aesthetics, ethics, and religion.
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.
This book argues that Hegel and Heidegger offer two divergent paths towards reconciling the dichotomy between nature and world inherited from modern philosophy. Raoni Padui traces the ways in which nature is incorporated into the domain of meaningful human dwelling that Heidegger calls "world" and Hegel calls "Spirit" or Geist.
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.
Witch. Temptress. Snow Queen.
For ages, labels like these have been used to malign women and deny their leadership potential. Now, we're reclaiming them.
International leadership expert Jocelyn Davis presents twelve timeless female archetypes reimagined and refreshed with stories of literary and everyday women who fought, cajoled, commanded, schemed, or blasted their way free of the chains that bound them. Discover your personal types, along with inspiration and strategies for expanding your range, tapping your inner power, and unleashing your natural leadership in work and life.
"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.
Richard McCombs presents Søren Kierkegaard as an author who deliberately pretended to be irrational in many of his pseudonymous writings in order to provoke his readers to discover the hidden and paradoxical rationality of faith. Focusing on pseudonymous works by Johannes Climacus, McCombs interprets Kierkegaardian rationality as a striving to become a self consistently unified in all its dimensions: thinking, feeling, willing, acting, and communicating. McCombs argues that Kierkegaard's strategy of feigning irrationality is sometimes brilliantly instructive, but also partly misguided. This fresh reading of Kierkegaard addresses an essential problem in the philosophy of religion--the relation between faith and reason.
Polyphony--the interweaving of simultaneous sounds--is a crucial aspect of music that has deep implications for how we understand the mind. In Polyphonic Minds, Peter Pesic examines the history and significance of "polyphonicity"--of "many-voicedness"--in human experience. Pesic presents the emergence of Western polyphony, its flowering, its horizons, and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains.
When we listen to polyphonic music, how is it that we can hear several different things at once? How does a single mind experience those things as a unity (a motet, a fugue) rather than an incoherent jumble? Pesic argues that polyphony raises fundamental issues for philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and neuroscience--all searching for the apparent unity of consciousness in the midst of multiple simultaneous experiences.
After tracing the development of polyphony in Western music from ninth-century church music through the experimental compositions of Glenn Gould and John Cage, Pesic considers the analogous activity within the brain, the polyphonic "music of the hemispheres" that shapes brain states from sleep to awakening. He discusses how neuroscientists draw on concepts from polyphony to describe the "neural orchestra" of the brain. Pesic's story begins with ancient conceptions of God's mind and ends with the polyphonic personhood of the human brain and body. An enhanced e-book edition allows the sound examples to be played by a touch.
The liberal arts are dying. They are dying because most Americans don't see the point of them. Americans don't understand why anyone would study literature or history or the classics--or, more contemporarily, feminist criticism, whiteness studies, or the literature of postcolonial states--when they can get an engineering or business degree.
Even more concerning is when they read how "Western civilization" has become a term
of reproach at so many supposedly thoughtful institutions; or how fanatical political correctness works hard to silence alternative viewpoints; or, more generally, how liberal studies have become scattered, narrow, and small. In this atmosphere, it's hard to convince parents or their progeny that a liberal education is all that wonderful or that it's even worthy of respect.
Over sixty years ago, we were introduced to the idea of "the two cultures" in higher education-- that is, the growing rift in the academy between the humanities and the sciences, a rift wherein neither side understood the other, spoke to the other, or cared for the other. But this divide in the academy, real as it may be, is nothing compared to another great divide--the rift today between our common American culture and the culture of the academy itself.
So, how can we rebuild the notion that a liberal education is truly of value, both to our students and to the nation? Our highest hopes may be not to "restore" the liberal arts to what they looked like fifty or a hundred years ago but to ask ourselves what a true contemporary American liberal education at its best might look like.
Remedying this situation will involve knowing clearly where we wish to go and then understanding how we might get there. For those objectives, this book is meant to be the beginning.
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.
Then
In 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 delineates the essential difference between the Barbarians and the Greeks. This difference Brann calls Athens' "elusive essence," its freedom contrasting with the slavery upon which the Persian empire depended.
Now
In the second essay, the author delves into what it means for a person to unite a disposition toward conservatism with a capacity to reiterate and rehearse events, scenes, and dramas in "the conservatory of the imagination." To uncover the meanings and consequences of this union--this imaginative conservatism--and the type of soul to which it applies, Brann offers twelve perspectives, starting with "Temperamental Disposition" and ending with "Eccentric Centrality" (without ever explicitly focusing on politics). Join her and you'll find both delight and education.
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 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).
