The Agora was a central public space in ancient Greek city-states. It was a city-state’s ‘gathering place’ or ‘assembly’ to accommodate the social and political order of the polis. The concept is in line with the ideals of this institute. The Global Village has no single and bespoke ‘Village green’, ‘Speakers Corner’ or ‘Parish pump’ for Thinkers to gather together and pool original ideas. This website is in furtherance of that potential.

The two keys question of this institute being ‘What can we know?’ and ‘How can we better adjust our thinking to refashion the world according to our best dictates’ the papers in the first section help towards factually underpinning advances in explanations of mental or natural events including what in past eras were regarded as arising out of questionable or supernatural causes, and in the second section is found websites and abstracts of Thinkers who have devoted much research into this question.

It is said that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. This piece has been a personal exercise, as is all writing. It has enabled the writer to work out his conclusions for himself, and therefore no doubt to ingest them better – one byproduct is that a personal effort, as opposed to a spoonfed offering, is more likely to be taken into ourselves, becoming part of our take on the world. Our route to our conclusions may be slightly different to the conclusions drawn by others but it is nevertheless striking how many people arrive at almost identical ideas. It can be regarding as validating the ideas, and as an illustration that there exists a body of people with a wish to reflect on the world. The more it becomes a community the more chance there will be that their ideas can feed off each other.

There are links to papers, abstracts and websites of thinkers about the world in which we live, whether in personal terms or the world around us.