'What is time?' Well-known philosopher and intellectual historian, Eva Brann mounts an inquiry into a subject universally agreed to be among the most familiar and the most strange of human experiences. Brann approaches questions of time through the study of ten famous texts by such thinkers as Plato, Augustine, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, showing how they bring to light the perennial issues regarding time. She also offers her independent reflections. Examining the three phases of time, past, present, and future, she argues that neither external time nor the time of the human past is real: the one is a comparison of motions and the other a projection of memory. She concludes that true time is internal and has its origin in the imaginative structure of memory and expectation. Throughout her rich and original study, Brann never fudges the central fact that time is a mystery.
**
Review
Brann has a true aptitude for felicitous expression, and one can feel through her prose the presence of a great and patient teacher. (Dennis Sepper, University of Dallas)
Past and future are a construction; time is now, and it comes from within. A philosopher and a long-haul St. John's College faculty member, Brann can make abstruse speculations readable. ( Baltimore Sun )
This is an interesting and challenging book―interesting because of its passion and eloquence, and challenging because of the questions it raises explicitly and implicitly. ( Time's News )
A forceful, thorough, and illuminating study of time that deserves a place among the standard works on the subject. Eva Brann writes with a rare combination of mastery and humanity. Hers is a heroic mind, at home in the clash and justice of ideas. (Robert Grudin, author of Time and the Art of Living)
About the Author
Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis. This book is part of her trilogy dealing with three central human capacities. The World of Imagination explores our ability to make the absent present. The Ways of Naysaying deals with our ability to deny existence, reality, or being. This component of her trilogy, What, Then, Is Time?, discovers our ability to live with what is no longer, or not yet.
General
History & Surveys
Philosophy

upload/motw_shc_2025_10/shc/What, Then, Is Time_ - Eva Brann.epub

motw/What, Then, Is Time_ - Eva Brann.epub

motw/What, Then, Is Time_ - Eva Brann.pdf

Brann, Eva.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

United States, United States of America

Lanham, MD, ©1999

2, 2001

Memory of the World Librarian: Calamitous Annunciation

"What is time?" Eva Brann approaches this fascinating question through the study of ten famous texts and through independent reflections. Both approaches drive toward the conclusion that ordinary, natural succession-time has its origin in a very central human experience, that of time's three "phases", past, present, and future, and that peculiar abuses or pathologies which have powerful human consequences are associated with each phase, as its nature is worked out.

2025-10-27