William Shea established his international reputation by his book on "Galileo's Intellectual Revolution", translated into several languages and followed by a series of essays on various aspects of Galileo's activities. He is universally recognized as one of the leading authorities on the subject. Numerous studies on Descartes and his contemporaries as well as on Kant and Hegel, on the history of nuclear physics and on modern science show the wide range of his work. He is one of the few historians of science who is equally at home in the philosophy of science. His election as Secretary-General of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and President of the International Academy of the History of Science bears witness to the esteem in which he is held by scholars everywhere.

Edward Shorter, a social historian with an extraordinary range, has written on problems connected with both Germany and France, and then published a general book on the making of the modern family. Subsequently he became particularly interested in the history of medicine. He has notably contributed to the understanding of women's encounters with ill health, and also gone on to examine the troubled history of doctors and their patients. Most recently he has been writing about the history of psychosomatic illness, on the sound premise that biology and culture interact in the production of symptoms. He is one of those exceptional people bridging medicine and social science, who at the same time has always sought to put our understanding of the past in a scholarly perspective which has won him recognition both abroad as well as on this continent.

Studies by H. Gordon Skilling of national communism in the eight countries of Eastern Europe were the first to subject the Peoples' Democracies to systematic comparative investigation and analysis. A new field of 'area stiidies' accordingly was born and Canadian scholarship, perhaps for the first time, may be credited with a significant contribution to this developing discipline. Based on painstaking historical research, and extensive inquiry in the countries under investigations fortified by the techniques of behavioural science and an intimate knowledge of the languages and culture of Czechoslovakia, his writings deal with a subject-matter notoriously prone to ideological distortion and partisan polemic in the best tradition of dispassionate scholarly inquiry. At the same time they never lose sight of the tragic aspect of so much of what has happened to the peoples of these lands, and the dispassion of the social scientist is matched by the compassion of the humanist. He has stripped from the subject-matter threadbare notions of monolithic communism and uniform satellite relationships to expose a variety of social systems and inter-governmental patterns. He is the academic pioneer of the concept of East European polycentrism, and few more important discoveries have been made by any Canadian social scientist.

Brian Slattery, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, is a legal scholar who rejected the conventional, Eurocentric doctrine that recognized the reception of English and French law into Canada, but made no room for Aboriginal rights. He has proposed a novel theory of Aboriginal rights and their relationship to federal and provincial laws, which has now been accepted by courts as well as by scholars. The work has transformed the way in which scholars think about the foundations of the legal system, and placed Aboriginal rights on a secure legal footing.

Francis Edward Sparshott has broken new ground in the difficult but developing philosophic approach to aesthetics. In this area and in ethics, as well an in general philosophic procedure, his clarification of basic concepts has enhanced present-day interest in philosophical studies, and has placed him among the leading Canadian writers in the discipline. Past president of the Canadian Philosophical Association, he is currently University Professor Emeritus in the University of Toronto.

Nico Stehr is one of Canada's principal social theorists who has gained international recognition for his work in the philosophy and the sociology of science as well as for his writings concerned with the social basis of ideas. He is a key member of a group of scholars who have contributed considerably to the revival of the sociology of knowledge and social epistemology. He is in addition one of the founding editors of the very successful "Canadian Journal of Sociology" which is about to enter its tenth year of publication. He continues to be associated with the "Journal" as one of its editors.

Pamela STEWART, Professor of Italian and Chairman of the Department at McGill University, has gained international recognition through her numerous studies of Italian literature in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Her wide-ranging work on Boccaccio, her penetrating essays on the development of the novel and of other forms of art, in particular of the theatre, as well as her reflections on aesthetics and on the relation between painting and poetry, have won the praise of literary critics in Europe and America. Her book on Gentillet, remarkable for the originality of its scholarship and the definitive character of its conclusions, has been hailed as a major contribution to the study of the reception of, and polemic against, Machiavelli, and noted for the light it sheds on cultural relations between Italy and France.

Peter Suedfeld, Professor of Psychology and former Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of British Columbia, is a major figure in Personality and Social Psychology, His seven books and more than two hundred articles on restricted environmental stimulation research, sensory deprivation, behavioural medicine, and conceptual complexity have given him a world wide reputation as a leader in research in Psychology.

Darko R. Suvin, Ph.D. Zagreb University, has taught and published in the fields of theatre arts, English, and comparative literature in Yugoslavia, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the United States, U.K., and Japan; he taught 1968-2000 at McGill University. His writings include 34 books (translated into eight languages), 14 edited volumes, and over 200 major articles. He has a major interest in modern dramaturgy (Brecht, Japanese theatre), utopian and science fiction, political epistemology, and ex-Yugoslavia; many items and full vita with publications in Croatoserbian are available on http://darkosuvin.com/ and https://independent.academia.edu/DarkoSuvin/Papers He has received the Pilgrim Award for "Metamorphoses of Science Fiction", Yale UP 1979, and the L.T. Sargent Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Utopian Studies. Recent titles: Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, augmented edn., P. Lang, 2016; Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia, Brill, 2016, and Harvester P, 2017; Lessons from the Russian Revolution and Its Fallout, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Southeast Europe, 2017; Communism, Poetry, Political Animal, 2020; Brecht’s Communist Manifesto Today. Aakar, 2020; Parables of Freedom and Narrative Logics: Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction and Utopianism, 2 Vols., P. Lang, 2021; Disputing the Deluge, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022; A Long Hope: The Prometheus Counter-Project.Ilha do desterro 76.2 (2023).