- ALGOL (Beta Persei). Surely one of the most remarkable stars of the sky and appropriately one of the most famed, Algol is the second magnitude Beta star of Perseus, the great mythological hero who rescued Andromeda from Cetus the Sea Monster.
- 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.