本书是由日本知名汉学家沟口雄三、小岛毅主编的日本重要汉学家关于中国近代以前思想、文化的论集。全书分为上篇“中国的思维世界”和下篇“礼治与政教”两个部分。上篇主要是关于中国古代思想、文化的通论，内容相当广泛，涉及中国古代的自然观、天理观、术数学以及天谴论、人性论等，时间范围则自上古至明清，论述的对象有董仲舒、朱熹、许皓等重要思想家。下篇则主要围绕“礼治与政教”的专题展开，集中论述中国古代官方及民间繁复的礼制以及其中所蕴涵的文化政治意义，如古代皇帝的朝政礼仪、祭祀礼仪、建筑所体现的礼仪、民间社会中的礼仪以及对近代社会的影响等。这些文章从大量史料出发，包括正史、文集、笔记、考古材料以及社会史文献等，分析细致，见解深刻，体现了严谨的治学态度，对中国古代思想文化的认识有借鉴意义。

Upon its publication, George Seldes's The Great Thoughts instantly took its place as a classic--a treasure house of the seminal ideas that have shaped the intellectual history of the world down through the ages. Seldes, a pivotal figure in the history of American journalism and a tireless researcher, spent the better part of his extraordinary lifetime compiling the thoughts that rule the world, casting his net widely and wisely through the essential works of philosophy, poetry, psychology, economics, politics, memoirs, and letters from the ancient Greeks to the modern Americans.
Now Seldes's splendid and important work has been revised and updated to include the great thoughts that have changed our world in the decade since the book's first appearance. Quotations from leaders as varied as Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Yitzak Rabin, Newt Gingrich, and Jesse Jackson reflect the radical shifts in the world political scene. Toni Morrison and Cornel West speak out on the enduring vitality of African-American culture. Alvin Toffler and Arthur C. Clarke give us a glimpse into the future. Gloria Steinem and Monique Wittig define the motives and the goals of late twentieth-century feminism. Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Wallace Stegner ponder the meaning of wilderness in an increasingly populated and industrialized world. These and scores of other thinkers in all major disciplines have added their voices to this new edition of The Great Thoughts .
USA Today praised the first edition of The Great Thoughts as "a browser's delight." The work of a lifetime, brought up-to-date to reflect the global upheaval of the past decade, The Great Thoughts stands alone as an enduring achievement and an invaluable resource.

Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Once our ancestors learned to put their heads together with others to pursue shared goals, humankind was on an evolutionary path all its own.

Tomasello argues that our prehuman ancestors, like today's great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello's "shared intentionality hypothesis" captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together. What differentiates us most from other great apes, Tomasello proposes, are the new forms of thinking engendered by our new forms of collaborative and communicative interaction.

A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.

This monograph reports a thought experiment with a mathematical structure intended to illustrate the workings of a mind. It presents a mathematical theory of human thought based on pattern theory with a graph-based approach to thinking. The method illustrated and produced by extensive computer simulations is related to neural networks. Based mainly on introspection, it is speculative rather than empirical such that it differs radically in attitude from the conventional wisdom of current cognitive science.