The second volume of the proceedings of J. Murre's 75th birthday conference (held in Leiden in 2004) contains fifteen research articles on various aspects of motives and algebraic cycles. The two main themes represented here are the conjectures of Bloch and Beilinson (refined by Murre) on the existence of a canonical filtration on Chow groups (articles by Beauville; Bloch and Esnault; Jannsen; Kahn, Murre and Pedrini; and Miller, Müller-Stach, Wortmann, Yang and Zuo) and Hodge-theoretical methods in the study of algebraic cycles (articles by Asakura and S. Saito; Lewis; Nagel; Peters and Steenbrink; and M. Saito). Other topics include: finite-dimensionality of motives - Kimura (and Jannsen); semistable vector bundles - Deninger and Werner, and Brivio and Verra; Mordell-Weil lattices for elliptic K3 surfaces – Shioda; and arithmetic aspects of diffraction patterns - Stienstra.