Margaret Boden
is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at Sussex University. She has served as Vice-President of the British Academy and the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Her books include Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man, Artificial Intelligence and Psychology, Piaget, and The Creative Mind.

Yves Bonnefoy
is a poet and writer. A member of the Académie Française, he has been awarded numerous prizes including the Prix Montaigne, Prix Florence Gould, Grand Prix nationaux, and Grand Prix de poésie. Apart from poetry his other published works includes L’Improbable; Arthur Rimbaud; Rome 1630; Miró, L'Arrière-Pays, Alberto Giacometti, and La vie errante.

Atilio Boron
is Professor of Political Science at the Centro de Investigaciones Europeo-Latinoamericanas, Uinversity of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Pierre Boulez
is regarded as one the century's great composers and conductors. He has been the Principal Conductor with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Musical Director of the New York Philharmonic and the Founder, Director and President of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris.

Pierre Bourdieu
is Professor of Sociology, the Director of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, and Director of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales at the Collège de France, Paris. His books include The Algerians, The Inheritors, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Distinction, Homo Academicus, Language and Symbolic Power, and Responses.

Peter Bürger
is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Bremen. He has published in the fields of the sociology of literature and aesthetics. His book Theory of the Avant-garde has been widely translated. His recent work has been concerned with the problems of modernity and postmodernity.

John Casti
is a resident member of the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico and Professor at the Institute of Econometrics, Operations Research and System Theory, Technical University of Vienna. His books include Paradigms Lost, Five Goldens Rules, Complexification and The Cambridge Quintet

Noam Chomsky
is Institute Professor and Ferrari Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT.The receipt of numerous honourary degrees he has also been awarded the Kyoto Prize in Basic Science. The author of over 50 books, including Syntactic Structures, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Cartesian Linguistics, Language and Mind, Problems of knowledge and Freedom, Reflections on Language, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, Essays on Form and Interpretation, Human Rights and American Foreign Policy, Turning the Tide, Generative Grammer, Necessary Illusions, and Chronicles of Dissent.

Jacques Derrida
is Director, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. His publications include, De La Grammatologie, L'écriture et la différence, Marges, De L’esprit, Le probléme de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl, Donner le temps, and Spectres de Marx.

Sir Michael Dummett
is Emeritus Wykeham Professor of Logic at University of Oxford University and an Emeritus Fellow of New College. A dedicated campaigner for racial justice his philosophical works include Frege: Philosophy of Language, Justification of Deducation, Elements of intuitionism, Truth and Other Engimas, The Logic Basis of Metaphysics, The Seas of Language and The Origins of Analytical Philosophy.

Eduardo Galeano
is a writer and journalist living in Montevideo, Uruguay. His books include Las venas abiertas de América Latina, La canción de nosotros, the trilogy Memoria del fuego, El libro de los abrazos, Las palabras andantes, El fútbol a sol y sombra, and Las aventuras de los jóvenes dioses.

Henry Louis Gates Jr
is W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University. Apart from numerous edited volumes, his books include Figures in Black, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, and Thirteen Ways to Look at a Black Man.

Sheldon Glashow
shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics for his contribution,'to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including inter alia the prediction of the weak netural current'. He is Higgins Professor of Theoretical Physics at Harvard University and has published over 200 papers on elementary particle physics.

Nadine Gordimer
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. The citation read: 'Nadine Gordimer who through her magnificent, epic writing has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity.' Her collections of short stories include Friday's Footprint, Livingstone's Companions, A Soldier's Embrace, Six feet of the Country and Why Haven't You Written? Among her novels are The Lying Days, A World of Strangers, A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist, The Late Bourgeois World, Burger's Daughter, July's People and My Son's Story. She has received numerous literary awards including the Booker Prize, the Malaparte Prize, the Grand Aigle d'Or and the Benson Medal.

Stephen Jay Gould
is a Zoologist, Botanist, Geologist and Writer. He is Professor of Geology, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, and Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at Harvard University. He is the receiptant of the Silver Medal, Zoological Society of London, Distinguished Service Award, American Geological Institute and the Gold Medal, Linnaean Society of London. Among his many best-selling book are The Panda’s Thumb, The Mismeasure of Man, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, The Flamingo’s Smile, An Urchin in the Storm, Wonderful Life; Bully for Brontosaurus, Eight Little Piggies, and Dinosaurs in The Haystack.

Amy Gutmann
is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Her major publications include Democratic Education, Liberal Equality and most recently Colour Conscious with Anthony Appiah. Her teaching and research interests include moral and political philosophy, practical ethics, educational theory and practice, and public affairs.

Gerald Holton
is Emeritus Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Among numerous awards he received the Presidential Citation for Service to Education in 1984. His books includeThematic Origins of Scientific Thought, Scientific Imagination, The Advancement of Science and its Burdens, and Science and Anti-Science.

Donald Johanson
is the Founder and Director of the Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University at Tempe. His discovery in 1974 of a three million years old hominid skeleton, popularly known as 'Lucy', in the Hadar region of Ethiopia has had an extraordinary influence on research of early hominid evolution.

Randall Kennedy
is Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School. His research interests include the intersection of racial conflict and legal institutions in American life and he is the author of Race, Crime, and the Law.

Sir Harry Kroto
shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of a new form of carbon called carbon-60. He is a Royal Society Research Professor in the School of Chemistry, Physics and Environmental Science at the University of Sussex.

Wolfgang Kummer
is Professor of Theoretical Physics and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Technical University of Vienna. He has served as President of the council of CERN, the European Centre for High Energy Physics in Geneva.

Hans Küng
was formerly the Professor of Ecumenical Theology and Director of the Institute of Ecumenical Research, Tübingen University. He is currently the Director of the Global Ethic Foundation. His books in English include The Council and Reunion, Justification, Signposts to the Future, Freud and The Problem of God, Infallible?, Art and the Question of Meaning, Mozart, Theology for The Third Millennium and Global Responsibility.

Toni Morrison
was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature with the citation that her, 'novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality'. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. Her other novels include The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Paradise.

Linda Nochlin
is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Art, New York University. she specializes in the art of the nineteeth and twentieth centuries. Among her numerous publications are Realism and Tradition in Art 1848-1900, Realism, The Politics of Vision, The Body in Pieces and Representing Women.

Martha Nussbaum
is Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books including Poetic Justice, Love's Knowledge, The Fragility of Goodness and Cultivating Humanity.

Sir Roger Penrose
is Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford University and Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College. His research encompasses black holes, quantum gravity, aperiodic tiling and the science of the mind. In addition to a large number of technical papers he has published influential popular books The Emperor's New Mind, Shadows of The Mind and The Large, the Small and the Human Mind.

John Polanyi
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1986 for his contribution to, 'understanding the dynamics of chemical elementary processes'. He is University Professor of Chemistry, University of Toronto. Other awards include the Chemical Institute of Canada Medal, Wolf Prize in Chemistry, Royal Medal of the Royal Society.

Richard Rorty
is Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia. A MacArthur Fellow his publications include Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature, Consequences of Pragmatism, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth and Essays on Heidegger and Others.

Edward Said
is University Professor, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is a prolific writer on a wide range of subjects including literature, music, cultural criticism and Palestinian issues. He is the author of Joseph Conrad and The Fiction of Autobiography, The Question of Palestine, Literature and Society, Orientialism, The World, The Text and The Critic, Musical Elaborations, and Culture and Imperialism.

Jean Starobinski
is President, Rencontres Institute de Genève. He has received the Chevalier Légion d’honneur and his books include Rousseau, The Invention of Liberty, The Emblem of Reason, and Montaigne in Motion.

George Steiner
was Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Geneva and is now Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. The receiptant of numerous honorary degrees he has been awarded Le Prix du Souvenir, King Albert Medal of the Royal Belgian Academy, and the Chevalier Légion d’honneur. His publications include Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, The Death of Tragedy, Language and Silence, After Babel, Heidegger, Antigones, and Proofs and Three Parables.