- When I moved to Minneapolis from upstate New York last year, I found myself puzzled by the layout of the streets and avenues across the city. Why, for example, did every street and avenue in my neighborhood have Southeast (SE) as a suffix? And why did that change to South (S) when I went to neighborhoods like Seward and Whittier? These questions lingered in my mind while wandering the city by bike, bus and light rail. I tried to find the origin of the north–south divide and the east/not-east divide, as well as the underlying structure of the streets and avenues.
- 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.