Piet Strydom, an Apartheid émigré who has been described as 'someone with unusual credentials and theoretical imagination, an author little constrained by convention', teaches in the Department of Sociology, University College Cork, Ireland. His publications include Discourse and Knowledge (2000), Risk, Environment and Society (2002), and Philosophies of Social Science (2003, edited and introduced with Gerard Delanty). Most recently, he edited a special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory (10/3, 2007) on the theme of 'Social Theory after the Cognitive Revolution' and wrote on 'Philosophies of the Social Sciences' for the UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS).