David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, here argues that gestures are active participants in both speaking and thinking. He posits that gestures are key ingredients in an "imagery-language dialectic" that fuels speech and thought. The smallest unit of this dialectic is the growth point, a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage. In "Gesture and Thought", the central growth point comes from a Tweety Bird cartoon. Over the course of twenty-five years, the McNeill Lab showed this cartoon to numerous subjects who spoke a variety of languages, and a fascinating pattern emerged. The shape and timing of gestures depends not only on what speakers see but on what they take to be distinctive; this, in turn, depends on the context. Those who remembered the same context saw the same distinctions and used similar gestures; those who forgot the context understood something different and changed gestures or used none at all. Thus, the gesture becomes part of the growth point - the building block of language and thought. "Gesture and Thought" is an ambitious project in the ongoing study of how we communicate and how language is connected to thought.

A comparative study of what the most influential writers of Ancient Greece and China thought it meant to have knowledge and whether they distinguished knowledge from other forms of wisdom. It surveys selected works of poetry, history and philosophy from the period of roughly the eighth through to the second century BCE, including Homer's "Odyssey", the ancient Chinese "Classic of Poetry", Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War", Sima Qian's "Records of the Historian", Plato's "Symposium", and Laozi's "Dao de Jing and the writings of Zhuangzi". The intention, through such juxtaposition, is to introduce the foundational texts of each tradition which continue to influence the majority of the world's population.
'An outstanding example of this approach to comparative philosophy can be found in Steven Shankman and Stephen Durrant's comprehensive study of ancient Greek and Chinese thought, The Siren and the Sage. Shankman and Durrant make an exceptionally valuable contribution to the study of comparative philosophy, for their analysis of the nature of knowledge and wisdom provides a compelling answer to many of the objections that have been raised against it in recent times. They not only show how to do comparative philosophy without "essentializing" a culture, they also demonstrate that the study of comparative philosophy can make a significant contribution to the study of the perennial issues of philosophy.'--Sanford Lakoff