Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, by Martha C. Nussbaum Martha Nussbaum’s new book concerns “a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance.” The silent, cancer-like crisis she means to bring to public awareness by her “call to action,” her “manifesto,” is a new specter haunting the world—an extremely utilitarian, for-profit view [...]
Sophocles: The Theban Plays, translated by David R. Slavitt This is the most stripped-down version of the three Theban plays of Sophocles that I have read. As I write, I am surrounded by more than 15 translations retrieved from my shelves and the college library. David Slavitt’s book is by far the shortest and the [...]
Since this lecture is a labor of love, I shall not scruple to enhance its legitimacy by adducing documentary proof that there exists an old tradition of offering transatlantic tributes to Jane Austen. In 1852 a female member of the distinguished Quincy family of Boston wrote as follows to one of Jane Austen’s naval brothers, [...]
Plato’s Republic: A Study, by Stanley Rosen Plato’s Republic, Stanley Rosen says at the beginning of his book, is “both excessively familiar and inexhaustibly mysterious.” Thus it invites ever more interpretations, not, I think, by reason of any willful indeterminacy or woolly grandeur on Plato’s part, but because a false sense of knowing the work [...]
The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling, by Gertrude Himmelfarb. The Moral Imagination is a very engaging collection of a dozen essays on a dozen authors by a historian in the appreciative mode. Some pieces go back to the ’60s, some are recent, all are substantially revised even to the point of recantation. [...]
Having read several of Eva Brann’s books, I can say without exaggeration that she is among the most impressive contemporary scholarly readings. Among the qualities that make her so astute is that she is extraordinary at two things: she is a practiced close reader, and she has a range of knowledge that is generally limited [...]
It is a wondrous turn of events how a conversation, a new book on Heraclitus (The Logos of Heraclitus) by the magnificent Great Books scholar, Eva Brann, finding Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, and my particular sitz im laben moved me to reread and rethink an important pre-Socratic philosopher. To begin, I find the [...]
Eva Brann’s Paradoxes of Education in a Republic is one of the top five books on liberal education written in the past 35 years. I shall revisit this marvelous book to consider how well it speaks to the current situation in higher education. Ms. Brann is tutor and former dean of St. John’s College, the great-texts college [...]