Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) was, in the opinion of many, the most important American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. He was, Richard Rorty writes, "as original a mind as C. S. Peirce, and it has taken almost as long for the importance of his ideas to be appreciated." This collection, coedited by Sellars's chief interpreter and intellectual heir, should do much to elucidate and clearly establish the significance of this difficult thinker's vision for contemporary philosophy.

The volume presents the most readable of Sellars's essays in a sequence that illuminates what Robert Brandom calls the "inferentialist" conception of meaning at the heart of his work. This conception, laid out in the early essays, is deployed in various epistemological contexts throughout the book so that, upon arriving at the concluding papers on Kant, the reader has been given a tour d'horizon not only of the central topics of philosophy of mind and language, but of much of the history of philosophy as well--and, with this, a sense of what a shifting of analytic philosophy from its Humean into its Kantian stage would entail.

With the end of the Cold War, will the space race become a cooperative venture? This book, which tells the story of the European Space Agency, shows how such a cooperative enterprise has worked over the past three decades and how it might apply to future space science.

Linking fifteen European nations, the European Space Agency offers a working model of scientific, technological, and political cooperation on an international scale. Roger M. Bonnet and Vittorio Manno give us an insiders’ view of the agency—its beginnings as the European Space Research Organization, its development in the face of early difficulties, and its daily operations. Covering thirty years, this account traces the evolution of ESA’s programs, facilities, and capabilities and the establishment of its scientific, technological, industrial, and political policies and objectives. With an eye to future global space activities, the authors detail ESA’s relationships with its own member states and with other countries, particularly the United States. The history of cooperation between ESA and NASA as exemplified by two specific projects—Ulysses and the international space station—highlights the difficulties of associating different decision-making bodies and political systems.

Illustrated with pictures and diagrams, enlivened with anecdotes involving key world players in space science, this book provides a rich blend of factual information and personal recollection, history and interpretation. A timely contribution to the study of the politics of science and technology, it points the way to future international cooperation.