Eva Brann wrote these seven essays largely as clarifying incitements to students who were reading, or ought to have been reading, the works discussed. The first and last essays describe seemingly opposing views of how to view the world as an intelligible whole from he outside in by exploring the Pre-Socratics Heraclitus and Parmenides. The five essays in between focus on works by Kant and display the world as constituted from the human inside out.