Eva brann heraclitus biography

Brann was born in Berlin and immigrated to the United States in 1941.
Eva T. H. Brann (January 1, 1929 – October 28, 2024) was an American academician, dean and the longest-serving tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, where she has taught for fifty-eight years.

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by Chris McCaffery

The Logos of Heraclitus by Eva Brann (2011), Paul Dry Books: Philadelphia

Lucky Heraclitus to have such a disciple! Brann cuts through the misunderstanding that plagues ‘the obscure’ in this short book.

“A large book is a large evil”, Callimachus says; Hillsdale students might be willing to agree. Eva Brann’s The Logos of Heraclitus is neither, but the pithy saying is like Heraclitus’ aphorisms: compact, tense, and dismissive. Brann, a St. John’s College tutor, sets out to explain in this little volume what Heraclitus means by the word Logos, how it relates to the rest of his philosophy—or our idea of it: panta rhei, fire, all those wet feet—and the figures in the murky world of pre-Socratic philosophy who influenced the enigmatic aphorist.

We receive no full text from Heraclitus, only fragments and quotes in the works of other authors. Brann pays careful attention to the important aphorisms that we have, often offering her own translations to bring out key facets of the compact original Greek. She discusses Pythagoras and Homer and shows how Herac

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The Logos of Heraclitus

“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 obscurantis

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Review of The Logos of Heraclitus, by Eva Brann

Related papers

Parmenides, ΑΝΗΡ ΠΥΘΑΓΟΡΕΙΟΣ. Monistic Idealism (Mentalism) in Archaic Greek Metaphysics [abstract and table of contents p. 535].

Andrei V . Lebedev

Indo-European Linguistics and Classical Philology, 2017

Τhe title of this paper, "Parmenides the Pythagorean", has not been invented by the author, it has been "discovered" in ancient sources and constitutes a quotation. In his description of Elea Strabo calls Parmenides and Zeno ἄνδρες Πυθαγόρειοι. In 1892 John Burnet has replaced this ancient perception of Parmenides with a new one, "the father of materialism". The physicalist interpretation of Parmenides' concept of being (which derives from the late 19th century positivist reaction to Hegelianism and German idealism in the historiography of Greek philosophy) involves unsurmountable difficulties. What might be the purpose of a «theory» that the real world is a changeless mass of dead matter? Why was it presented as a divine revelation? Why would Dike, the personified Justice and con