Is Equality An Absolute Good?

By |2023-05-21T11:29:04-05:00March 8th, 2021|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, American Republic, Declaration of Independence, E.B., Equality, Eva Brann, Philosophy, Senior Contributors, St. John's College|

Fairness is an acknowledgement of just desserts, and therefore implies equality in dealings with similarly entitled partners. So it is indeed equality adjusted to circumstances that I desire. Thus there is an intimation that equality will come into play when justice is administered communally. Regarding the title: 1. The question mark expresses a genuine perplexity [...]

Reflections on Imaginative Conservatism

By |2023-05-21T11:29:05-05:00January 21st, 2021|Categories: Conservatism, E.B., Essential, Eva Brann, Imagination, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, The Imaginative Conservative|

My first and last care is not politics but education. Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought. But education is also inherently imaginative. Author’s Note: I wish to dedicate this essay to a writer of books whose greatness is at once [...]

The “Eumenides”: Patriotism & Moderated Modernity

By |2023-07-18T17:14:06-05:00October 4th, 2020|Categories: Books, Classics, E.B., Eva Brann, Featured, Great Books, Literature, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

The “Eumenides” is not a tragedy of the unresolvable impasse, of the unavoidable fatality. It is a “pragma,” an affair practically handled, whose outcome is not all-round cleansing by devastation, but a future of good daily living. Aeschylus invests this drama of sweet reason, of moderation triumphant, with exhilarating solemnity and participatory splendor. Aeschylus’ Eumenides is [...]

Castalia and St. John’s College

By |2023-05-21T11:29:07-05:00June 2nd, 2020|Categories: Books, E.B., Eva Brann, Great Books, Imagination, Liberal Learning, Literature, Myth, Senior Contributors, St. John's College|

“Waldzell” is the name Hermann Hesse gives to the school in a “Pedagogical Province” brought to life in the book called “The Glass Bead Game.” St. John’s College is an American school with two campuses. The features in which Waldzell is like St. John’s as well as those in which it differs are responsive; they [...]

Kant’s Imperative

By |2023-05-21T11:29:09-05:00December 29th, 2019|Categories: Culture, E.B., Ethics, Eva Brann, Immanuel Kant, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Philosophy, Reason, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Virtue|

What makes freedom possible is beyond all knowing, but what makes the moral law possible is freedom itself. The fact that we have a faculty of freedom is the critical ground of the possibility of morality. I have called this lecture “Kant’s Imperative” so that I might begin by pointing up an ever-intriguing circumstance. Kant [...]

Some Advice to Fellow Lovers of Liberal Learning

By |2023-05-21T11:29:10-05:00December 26th, 2019|Categories: E.B., Education, Eva Brann, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, St. John's College|

A preliminary function of a liberal education must be to serve as a purgative, a cleansing, of those who wish to be free. By its means we can cleanse ourselves of our undigested and unconscious prejudices. When it first came home to me that I would not be a tutor at the Graduate Institute in [...]

The Enduring Legend of “Antigone”

By |2023-05-21T11:29:11-05:00December 16th, 2019|Categories: Books, E.B., Eva Brann, Great Books, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Senior Contributors, Sophocles, St. John's College|

Greek myths have had an unbroken authority over the imagination of the West, and among them the Antigone legend is paramount in both shaping and expressing the moral constitution of Western humanity. Antigones, by George Steiner (Clarendon Press, 1984; Oxford Paperback, 1986; 328 pages) Anyone who has reread the Antigone about as often as is [...]

Love, Peace, and War in Italy: A Memoir

By |2023-05-21T11:29:12-05:00December 9th, 2019|Categories: Books, E.B., Europe, Eva Brann, History, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Senior Contributors, St. John's College|

Douglas Allanbrook’s memoir, “See Naples,”  is not only a memorial to the many dead, but also an exorcism, half-a-century later, of some particular ghosts. See Naples: A Memoir of Love, Peace, and War in Italy, by Douglas Allanbrook (A Peter Davison Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York and Boston, 1995) Douglas Allanbrook came to St. [...]

Jacob Klein: European Scholar and American Teacher

By |2023-05-21T11:29:13-05:00December 2nd, 2019|Categories: E.B., Education, Eva Brann, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Jacob Klein, Meno, Plato, Senior Contributors, St. John's College|

Jacob Klein presents the model of teaching best fitting a stable community of liberal learning. He was a master of the somewhat mysterious art of leading from behind—by solicitous listening, by intimating questions, even by expectant silence. The subtitle of my talk might be “Liberal Education: Program and/or Pedagogy?” The reason is that I think of Jacob [...]

Pre-Socratics or First Philosophers?

By |2023-05-21T11:29:14-05:00November 25th, 2019|Categories: Classics, E.B., Eva Brann, Great Books, Heraclitus, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Philosophy, Senior Contributors, Socrates, St. John's College|

The Pre-Socratics may be thought of as deficient, lacking something, primitive in the derogatory sense. But there is also the opposite perspective: These men were not primitive, without sophistication, but primeval, deeper, more receptive to origins. Think how peculiar this appellation is: “Pre-Socratics.” A whole slew of thinkers, poetical, aphoristic, prosaic—condemned to be known as [...]

Where, Then, Is Time?

By |2023-05-21T11:29:15-05:00November 11th, 2019|Categories: E.B., Eva Brann, Imagination, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Moral Imagination, Philosophy, Senior Contributors, St. Augustine, St. John's College, Time|

If it is the case that time never makes its appearance out in the world but only motion is in evidence, then either time is not or it is in the only other venue of which I can think, inside our soul. Let me first explain my odd-sounding title. It is a variation on the [...]

Understanding Hegel’s Theory on Time

By |2023-05-21T11:29:16-05:00November 4th, 2019|Categories: E.B., Eva Brann, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Liberal Learning, Nature, Order, Philosophy, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Time|

Time, it will turn out, is a kind of intuiting, indeed the matrix of all intuiting, but it is not therefore to be intuited, that is, looked at, rather than thought out. The moving pictures that Hegel himself suggests to illustrate the emerging determinations of thought are only concessions to our ordinarily representational minds. This [...]

“A Suitable Boy”

By |2023-08-10T14:39:20-05:00October 28th, 2019|Categories: Books, Community, E.B., Eva Brann, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Senior Contributors, St. John's College|

One of the qualities that makes ”Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy” so engaging a work is involvement. I mean that each of the cast of characters is involved with all the others, in series or in parallel, in accordance with the recognized register of traditional and contemporary relationships. A Suitable Boy: A Novel, by Vikram [...]

Go to Top