This collection of essays aims to explore fundamental questions about God, human nature, and political life through careful readings of the Greek poets, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare. The volume investigates the abiding tension between the Hebraic and the Hellenic dimensions of the Western soul through an examination of profound literary, philosophic, and theological reflections on topics as various as friendship, marriage, tyranny, sovereignty, sin, forgiveness, comedy, tragedy, and contemplation. Offered in honor of Mera J. Flaumenhaft, the essays reflect the intellectual rigor, moral seriousness, and disciplined imagination of her scholarship and teaching.

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.

Translation in English, with an introduction and glossary of key terms. Socrates on death, dying, and the soul. The glossary of key terms is a unique addition to Platonic literature by which concepts central to each dialogue are discussed and cross-referenced as to their occurrences throughout the work. In such a way students are encouraged to see beyond the words into concepts. Modern Students can now appreciate the wisdom of the world's greatest thinkers. Through clear, faithful translations, renowned scholars have made classical philosophical texts accessible and inspirational.

A first rate translation at a reasonable price. --Michael Rohr, Rutgers University

"It is a wonder and a delight to be led by Eva Brann through the Socratic conversations. She begins from first impressions and moves through perplexity to clarity, without losing the thread. 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 this collection of essays, Eva Brann talks with readers about the conversations Socrates has with his fellow Athenians. She shows how Plato's dialogues and the timeless matters they address remain important to us today. From introductory pieces on the "Republic," the "Phaedo," and the "Sophist" to an account of the less well known "Charmides," each essay starts where Plato starts, without presupposing a critical theory. In the title essay's brilliant account of the "Republic," Brann demonstrates its central importance in Plato's work. Other essays consider Plato's notion of time, discuss how to teach Plato to undergraduates' and contend that a thoughtful text-based study of Plato can have a very personal impact on a reader. Encouraged to befriend the dialogues, readers will join in the great Socratic conversations.

Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for more than fifty years.

Eva Brann examines the great philosophers and their articulations of the idea of "will." The diversity of thought found in the roughly fifty writers considered here suggests that the term refers not to just one fixed constituent of the "soul," but to many senses--perhaps linked, perhaps disparate.

Plato's "Sophist" takes the form of a conversation between four characters - Socrates, the great philosopher who is shortly to be tried for impiety and corruption, Theaetetus, a brilliant young mathematician, Theaetetus' elderly teacher Theodorus, and a stranger introduced as "a very philosophical man". The conversation, often considered one of the greatest of all Platonic dialogues, concerns "the purveyor of ignorance" - the sophist. In the Greece of Socrates' time there was a group of travelling professors who gave themselves the honorary title of "sophists", or "wisdom-pliers". Their principle activity was to sell their expertise, particularly of rhetorical techniques and of philosophical opinions. This trading of philosophical insight by those believing themselves to be universal experts is politely but devastatingly undermined by Socrates and his interlocutors, in this, one of the most important of Plato's extant philosophical texts.

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.

Who is Heraclitus and what is his "logos?"

In his great painting "The School of Athens" which hangs in the Vatican, 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."

So the "Logos" of Heraclitus is the order of the universe, the ruling idea which holds all together. Logos, in its multiform usage, can mean collection, reason, account, argument, and ratio.

The collected work of Heraclitus comprises 131 passages. Some scholars consider these 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 "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."

Eva Brann has taught at St. John's College in Annapolis for more than fifty years. She is a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Paul Dry Books has published her books "Homage to Americans," "Feeling Our Feelings," "Open Secrets / Inward Prospects," "The Music of the Republic," and "Homeric Moments."

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 fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy. This book emphasizes the broad range of Strauss's influence, from literary criticism to constitutional thought, and it denies the existence of a monolithic Straussian political orthodoxy. Both critics and supporters of Strauss' thought are included. All political theorists interested in Strauss's extraordinary impact on political thought will want to read this book.