THE AGORA

The Agora back in the centuries IV and V was an open space where people debating about politics, discussing laws, exchanging ideas and thoughts. Plato's Academy for example, or the same school of the famous and immense Aristotle. The Abbeys were very different, were dark places, hidden, cold, where silence was required. Candles were lit and smelled of damp and ink. The scratching of pens on parchment, was the only thing that broke the silence. Who does not remember as an example, beautiful film "On behalf of the Rose, based on the novel by Umberto Eco? That medieval Europe, where monasteries were the main centers of learning at the time, where the scribes monks copied, decorated, lit, classified and bound over all their lives, charters, papyri and codices. Records custodians of a large part of the culture that sustains us even today. The monastic libraries, became an excellent hiding place to protect the knowledge of the time and information of those times.
In the late seventeenth century, some European kings, intelligently, tackles, despite its absolutism, to reconcile with the great ideas of the boldest thinkers of his time and all, to be at the forefront of progress in their societies. It was so we could know the content of some Enlightenment philosophers sought: Voltaire. For example.
Monarchs, asked the men to move their treaties and theories into practice. They were advisers to kings, who lived in the sumptuous, glamorous and glitzy European courts. Those, intelligent, real leaders, made several of his palaces in art venues and study. Descartes, was the intellectual guidance of Cristina of Sweden. Voltaire, a great beacon of erudition and wisdom, was a consultant and advisor to Frederick II of Prussia, who defended his bitterest enemies.
Today, philosophers, thinkers, operating from their studies or from schools and from there, not only think and bring complicated ideas, also try to guide and recommend practical issues to resolve day to day as it announced the oracle of Delphi in that beautiful and breakthrough Greece: "Know yourself." O Socrates: "We do evil because we do not do good."
A few days ago, my desperation was so great to see everything that happens in the world, therefore problem without a solution, I stood in my humble desk and went to walk to the beach ... In my move to the sea, passed through a small farm of a peasant, and was when I got to ask some animals who were there, as they saw what happened to us humans: "How and when did evil in the world? What is it all of this? When will so much nonsense? " This is the question, a horse, a goose and a cow. And recording the answers well: A whinny, a croak and a grunt!
Agoras Our modern, have to be there, in universities, where the critics, the real thinkers, where you can breathe freedom, where young scholars can claim. That is the space necessary utopias, innovation and progress. Why we are taking so long ?!?!? We will have to continue dialogue and ask the animals???