Fundamental questions: The Axial Age debate as religious discourse / Hans Joas ; What was the Axial revolution? / Charles Taylor ; An evolutionary approach to culture : implications for the study of the Axial Age / Merlin Donald ; Embodiment, transcendence, and contingency : anthropological features of the Axial Age / Matthias Jung ; The Axial Age in global history : cultural crystallizations and societal transformations / Björn Wittrock ; The Buddha's meditative trance : visionary knowledge, aphoristic thinking, and Axial Age rationality in early Buddhism / Gananath Obeyesekere ; The idea of transcendence / Ingolf U. Dalferth
A comparative perspective: Religion, the Axial Age, and secular modernity in Bellah's theory of religious evolution / José Casanova ; Where do Axial commitments reside? : problems in thinking about the African case / Ann Swidler ; The Axial Age theory : a challenge to historism or an explanatory device of civilization analysis? : with a look at the normative discourse in Axial Age China / Heiner Roetz
Destructive possibilities?: The Axial conundrum between transcendental visions and vicissitudes of their institutionalizations : constructive and destructive possibilities / Shmuel N. Eisenstadt ; Axial religions and the problem of violence / David Martin ; Righteous rebels : when, where, and why? / W.G. Runciman
Reevaluations: Rehistoricizing the Axial Age / Johann P. Arnason ; Cultural memory and the myth of the Axial Age / Jan Assmann
Perspectives on the future: The Axial invention of education and today's global knowledge culture / William M. Sullivan
The future of transcendence : a sociological agenda / Richard Madsen
The heritage of the Axial Age : resource or burden? / Robert N. Bellah.