a project of John Trapp
Welcome to The Agora! An out of the way corner of the web.
[a note on the site refresh/missing content]
The Agora focuses on classical philosophies from both the East and the West. These texts, written before codified religion, remain among the best guides to practical philosophy. With our temporally enhanced viewpoint none of these texts can be accepted as 100% accurate, still there are kernels of knowledge which can be built into a practical personal philosophy.
Agora: An agora, translatable as marketplace, was a public space and an essential part of an ancient Greek polis or city-state. An agora acted as a marketplace and a forum to the citizens of the polis.
Agora also means a place of assembly in any Ancient Greek state. It is sometimes used in modern language to refer to a crossroads, either metaphorically (the point or concept which links, or is the crossroads of multiple related concepts), or literally, a point at which many physical roads or paths meet. (from Wikipedia)
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The East: |
The West: |
At its most basic level, the agora was a meeting place. It was the original ideal from which public spaces arose. The Agora offers a broad range of free texts containing primary documents relating to the founding philosophies of both the East and the West. The documents on this site respond to age old questions with tried and true answers. In the last two millennia the human psyche has changed remarkably little. The answers, as well as the paths leading to them, remain the same for us as they did for those who first put these writings down. Each of the philosophies here touched upon has at its root the improvement of the human condition.
To this end each of these texts help elucidate--or make clear-- what the ancient Greeks would phrase as Gnothi seauton or the later Latin writers would know as nosce te ipsum, or what we, modern speakers of English, would phrase as know thyself. It is this simple maxim that each of these texts aims to aid the reader in achieving.
As I write this I am going live with the site refresh. New colors, fonts, and layout; all designed to increase readability and to increase functionality on a wide range of devices. I have culled about half the content to focus on what I believe to be the important parts. Gone are the pages on Tolstoy, Kropotkin, and Mason; gone are the five essays that everyone should read; gone are the pages on Mohism and Skepticism. (The Tolstoy page will probably be integrated into gyration at some point, Mohism and Skepticism may make a return to this site at some future date, the rest is gone and all but forgotten.)
I have added a page on Buddhism, this is still being written and formatted. It will be added as it is finished.
a project of John Trapp
