- Star Tales - Capricornus (ianridpath.com)
Capricornus is an unlikely looking creature, with the head and forelegs of a goat and the tail of a fish. The constellation evidently originated with the Sumerians and Babylonians, who had a fondness for amphibious creatures; the ancient Sumerians called it SUHUR-MASH-HA, the goat-fish. But to the Greeks, who named it Αἰγόκερως (Aigokeros, or Aegoceros in Latin transliteration), meaning goat-horned, the constellation was identified with Pan, god of the countryside, who had the horns and legs of a goat.
stanford encyclopedia of philosophy
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (plato.standford.edu)
An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “History,” “The Over-Soul,” and “Fate.” Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an “existentialist” ethics of self-improvement. He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (Wikipedia)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity. Friedrich Nietzsche considered him “the most gifted of the Americans”, and Walt Whitman referred to him as his “master”.