A companion volume to "Conceptual Trends in Quantum Chemistry", this work contains eight contributions focusing on important conceptual trends in atomic and molecular theory. The "polarization" between ab initio and semi-empirical methods is thoroughly analyzed in two of the articles, which also provide bridges between such procedures. Hydrogen-transfer theory and electron delocalization are treated in two further papers. Explicitly time-dependent descriptions of intermolecular dynamics, which constitute a characteristic trend in current research, are represented by an article about the quantum dynamics of diatoms in external fields. A view of certain atomic excited states is presented in a paper on collective and independent particle character, and a new theoretical tool is surveyed in an article on dimensional scaling. The final article analyzes density functional theory.