What separates your mind from an animal's? Maybe you think it's your ability to design tools, your sense of self, or your grasp of past and future – all traits that have helped us define ourselves as the planet's preeminent species. But in recent decades, these claims have been eroded, or even disproven, by a revolution in the study of animal cognition: take the octopuses that use coconut shells as tools; the elephants that classify humans by age, gender, and language; or Ayumu, the young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame. Based on research involving crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, whales, and of course chimpanzees and bonobos, Frans de Waal demonstrates that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the depth of animal intelligence. He offers a firsthand account of how science has stood traditional behaviorism on its head by revealing how smart animals really are.

《西方神秘学指津》是一部导论性的著作，本书将西方神秘学作为一个学术研究领域，对其进行了系统的回顾，着重考察了神秘学领域中的定义和划界问题，梳理了该领域主要的历史潮流、关于神秘学的重要争论、神秘学的世界观、神秘学关于知识的观点、神秘学实践，神秘学对现代化的影响以及这一领域的跨学科性。