Agoraphilia

First, the Athenians suffered from an acute case of agoraphilia. They seemed to center a large portion of their daily lives around the activities of the public gathering places; hence, the temples and the agora would be the most likely places at which the relatives might see the slayer.

Rebirth through agoraphilia is then a special instance of flight into reality.

Though not noticeably a sufferer from claustrophobia, he certainly experienced agoraphilia. He had itchy feet and ants in his pants.

Secondly, there is an enthusiasm for crowded confrontational scenes — what amounts to an intellectual agoraphilia, one which will climax in Areopagitica.

My father is a lover of the agora: agoraphilia is his addiction. My father's passion for the agora is such that he never wishes to leave it. He does not like to leave the town.

In order to clarify the practical conditions of felicity of the scientific life, we might also reverse the view of Callicles, who only values the agoraphilia of the politician or rhetoretician, and take positively his list of negatives: that philosophy is something for children, not for mature grown-ups, that philosophers lack practical experience, play games, do not know how to address public meetings: in sum, that they are impractical, strange, other-worldly.

Its spacious market places, with their architectural colonnades, and its suburban gymnasia, ringed by trees, evidence not agoraphobia but agoraphilia — love of openness — wherever it was possible.

And where the endemic psychological problem of Earthmen is agoraphobia, the problem of Solarians is agoraphilia. Solarians so love the feeling of virgin space around them that they seldom come into personal contact with each other.