Chapter 7 describes a distinctively Indian phenomenon. The participation of individual autocrats (Kshatriyas) in the dialogues of the early Upanishads is associated with new metaphysical doctrines that will be shown to reflect monetisation. The social power that is interiorised in the construction of the unified inner self is in India (mainly) autocracy, whereas in Greece – where kingship is in decline – it is (mainly) monetary value.

Chapter 16 emphasises the complex diversity of the factors shaping the Greek and Indian intellectual revolutions, describes the metaphysical consequences of a variety of perspectives on money and accounts for the differences between brahman and the Parmenidean One.

Chapter 8 describes the development of the various forms of monism (material, personal, mental, abstract) after the Rigveda. The traditional correspondences, between ritual and what ritual controls, tend to collapse into a single identification, of subject with object, making for the prominence and coalescence of mental monism and abstract monism in the early Upanishads – under the influence of universal abstract value. Awareness of the unity of all things (monism) is associated with immortality. The monistic tendency is illustrated by focus on a single passage of the Chandogya Upani?ad.

Chapter 2 describes the set of metaphysical ideas that, roughly speaking, occurred at about the same time in India and Greece and nowhere else . For the sake of clarity I expose, right from the start, the weaknesses of several kinds of explanation, in particular the widely popular assumption of 'influence', while also setting out the evidence for the socio-economic transformations that I regard as the most important but relatively neglected factor.

Chapter 9 describes the earliest extant Indian beliefs about the afterlife, which were superseded by the idea of individually accumulated metaphysical merit accompanied by the danger of repeated death, which develops into the idea of subjection in the hereafter to a repeated cosmic cycle. All this prefigures the combination of individually accumulated karma with the universal cycle of reincarnation (sam?sara), from which escape was sought by various forms of renunciation. An important factor in these developments was the individual accumulation and universal circulation of money.

Chapter 12 classifies Greek monism with the same four categories as used for India, and describes the transition – also found in India – from reciprocity to monism, which is closely associated with the new inner self. The element of fire in universe and inner self allows cross-cultural comparison that includes Zoroastrianism and Buddhism.

As we have seen, Aristotle opens the Generation of Animals by announcing that he has already dealt with three of the four causes of animals and their parts (formal, final, and material) and that it remains to discuss the efficient cause. For ‘to inquire into this and to inquire into the manner of generation for each thing is, in a way, the same thing’ (GA I 1, 715a1–18). But here we immediately encounter a puzzle. On the one hand, the GA routinely identifies the male principle as the primary efficient cause of the animal and its parts, which is housed in another individual of the same species, namely the father. This would suggest that generation has an external efficient cause (external to the thing that comes to be from it).

Chapter 10 begins with a critique of the best existing attempt (by Obeyesekere) to explain the origins of what I call ethicised indiscriminate reincarnation (EIR) in India and in Greece. But in my view any successful explanation cannot exclude monetisation, which also contributes to the importance of cyclicality in reincarnation, and to the advent of the widespread and persistent idea of individually accumulated karma. This requires reflection on the different roles of kinship in Greece and India.

Chapter 1 gives a convenient summary of the whole book

Chapter 4 concerns the construction of the inner self in the Rigveda and in Homer. The comprehensive, bounded inner self with which we are familiar, but which is in fact given to us not by nature but as a construction found in some societies but not in others, is found neither in Homer nor in the Rigveda. Its absence can be correlated with polytheist reciprocity, whereas its subsequent development (i.e. of atman and psuche) can be correlated with various kinds of monism, of which there are a very few slight occurrences in the latest section of the Rigveda. The explanation I will give of these developments requires a preliminary description here of the phenomena of cosmisation (cosmic projection) and interiorisation (introjection).

Chapter 14 describes the opposition within early Greek metaphysics between the ontological privileging of (communal) circulation and of (individually owned) abstract value. Our three key processes of abstraction, monetisation and ritual are assessed as factors in the production of Parmenidean ‘reason’, a combination facilitated by the similarities between money and ritual, both of which contribute to the Greek doctrine of reincarnation, which was taught in mystic initiation and involved a cosmic projection (cosmisation) of monetised circulation.

Aristoxenus’ five books on the Pythagoreans clearly were an important source for the later Pythagorean tradition. However, if instead of treating Aristoxenus’ Pythagorean works as a group we are careful to focus just on the Pythagorean Precepts the situation is more complicated and interesting. Clearly the Precepts had a significant influence on Stobaeus and Iamblichus. The seven excerpts from the Precepts are an important part of the Pythagorean texts in Stobaeus’ overall collection of texts for the edification of his son.