James Evans

Aron Gurwitsch (1900-73) was one of the most important figures in the phenomenological movement between the 1920s and the 1970s. Through his introduction of Gestalt theoretical concepts into phenomenology, he exerted a powerful influence on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. The contributions to this memorial volume, most written by friends and students of Gurwitsch, contain critical studies of the work of Aron Gurwitsch and attempts to extend his philosophical analyses to new problems and fields. Ranging from formal ontology through the philosophy of the social sciences to the interpretation of Kant, the essays assembled here are both a tribute to and a continuation of the philosophical legacy of Aron Gurwitsch. The contributions will be of interest to advanced undergraduates and graduate students, and to specialists in a wide range of areas.

Derrida and Phenomenology is a collection of essays by various authors, entirely devoted to Jacques Derrida's writing on Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. It gives a wide range of reactions to those writings, both critical and supportive, and contains many in-depth studies. Audience: Communicates new evaluations of Derrida's critique of Husserl to those familiar with the issues: specialists in phenomenology, deconstruction, the philosophies of Derrida and Husserl. Also contains a bibliography of recent relevant literature.

The following paper continues discussions within this journal about how the work of Delueze and Guattari can inform radical pedagogy. Building primarily on Noel Gough's 2004 paper, we take up the challenge to move towards a more creative form of 'becoming cyborg' in our teaching. In contrast to work that has focused on Deleuzian theories of the rhizome, we deploy Guattari's work on institutional schizoanalysis to explore the role of group creativity in radical pedagogy. The institutional therapies of Felix Guattari's schizoanalytic practice in the 1950s and 1960s and, before him, the Francophone educationalist Celestin Freinet, who founded the Modern School Movement, are explored and used to illuminate examples of some of our own attempts to set the classroom up as a space for collective engagement. We conclude by exploring how this understanding of the class as subject group may be used to mobilise action and de-stabilise the coordinates of existing academic divisions of labour.

Collaboration requires agents to coordinate their behavior on the fly, sometimes cooperating to solve a single task together and other times dividing it up into sub‐tasks to work on in parallel. Underlying the human ability to collaborate is theory‐of‐mind (ToM), the ability to infer the hidden mental states that drive others to act. Here, we develop Bayesian Delegation, a decentralized multi‐agent learning mechanism with these abilities. Bayesian Delegation enables agents to rapidly infer the hidden intentions of others by inverse planning. We test Bayesian Delegation in a suite of multi‐agent Markov decision processes inspired by cooking problems. On these tasks, agents with Bayesian Delegation coordinate both their high‐level plans (e.g., what sub‐task they should work on) and their low‐level actions (e.g., avoiding getting in each other's way). When matched with partners that act using the same algorithm, Bayesian Delegation outperforms alternatives. Bayesian Delegation is also a capable ad hoc collaborator and successfully coordinates with other agent types even in the absence of prior experience. Finally, in a behavioral experiment, we show that Bayesian Delegation makes inferences similar to human observers about the intent of others. Together, these results argue for the centrality of ToM for successful decentralized multi‐agent collaboration.

Interdisciplinarity is a notoriously difficult concept to define, and even harder to achieve in practice. All too often social approaches reduce science to an object of study, or conversely physical science approaches are invoked as a source of 'higher' truth. Drawing upon our experiences as ESRC-NERC PhD students within geography, we outline a paratactical approach that links disciplines by adjacency rather than hierarchy. Toppling the disciplinary hierarchy creates the potential for non-reductionistic dialogue between science and social science, but it also raises a series of practical difficulties. These are considered around the themes of polyvocality, breadth over depth and (im)permanence. We suggest that while this kind of approach is increasingly encouraged by research funding bodies, it is less easily sustained within the everyday mechanics of the academic world. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved