During the past decade, patient participation became an important issue in the medical field, and patient participation in biomedical research processes is increasingly called for. One of the arguments for this refers to the specific kind of knowledge, called experiential knowledge, patients could contribute. Until now, participation of patients in biomedical research has been rare, and integration of patients’ experiential knowledge with scientific knowledge—in the few cases it takes place—occurs implicitly and on an ad hoc basis. This is illustrated by (...) describing and analyzing the activities of the German patient group on retinitis pigmentosa. The authors argue that to be able to optimize the use of experiential knowledge of patients in biomedical research, a systematic approach is required. Transdisciplinary research provides such an approach, systematically, explicitly, and deliberately integrating knowledge from different scientific and nonscientific sources. In this article, the concept of transdisciplinarity is elaborated upon. The authors propose a possible procedure, identify necessary conditions and skills, and evaluate the feasibility of its implementation and institutionalization. Finally, the authors introduce a recent research project to further investigate and implement transdisciplinary research in the biomedical field. (shrink)

In this article I argue for a transdisciplinary approach to the human or social sciences. There is little ontological or epistemological justification for a division among these disciplines. I recommend that sociology stop worrying about policing its disciplinary boundaries and begin to encourage various forms of intellectual transculturation. I then analyze barriers to transdisciplinarity by comparing disciplines to states and comparing the relations among disciplines to different sorts of imperial practice, or interstate relations. The most common interdisciplinary strategies are (...) analogous to the informal, nonterritorial imperialism practiced globally by the United States. Three other forms of interdisciplinarity are discussed: the annexation of one discipline by another — a situation that is analogous to colonialism; nonhegemonized systems of equal disciplines (analogous to the Westphalian state system); and nonimperial `traveling' and transculturation among disciplines (analogous to the practices of members of weak or declining imperial states). (shrink)

Philosophy and science have always striven to make sense of the world, continuously influencing each other in the process. Their interplay paved the way for neurophilosophy, which harnesses neuroscientific insights to address traditionally philosophical questions. Given the rapid neuroscientific and technological advances in recent years, this paper argues that philosophers who wish to tackle intractable philosophical problems and influence public discourse and policies should engage in neuro-techno-philosophy. This novel type of inquiry describes the transdisciplinary endeavor of philosophers, (neuro)scientists, and others (...) to anticipate the societal implications of the impending transformations of subjects and theorizers. While human enhancement is likely to irreversibly change what it means to be human, disruptive technologies might lead to the emergence of artificial intelligent agents and human-machine hybrids. The paper predicts that neuro-techno-philosophy will be indispensable to understanding and engaging with these game-changing innovations and thus play a pivotal role in the future of philosophy. (shrink)

The paper looks at challenges related to the ideas of integration and knowledge systems in extra-academic transdisciplinarity. Philosophers of science are only starting to pay attention to the increasingly common practice of introducing extra-academic perspectives or engaging extra-academic parties in academic knowledge production. So far the rather scant philosophical discussion on the subject has mainly concentrated on the question whether such engagement is beneficial in science or not. Meanwhile, there is quite a large and growing literature on extra-academic TD, (...) mostly authored by non-philosophers, seeking to develop TD research practices. We examine this literature in the light of recent discussions in pluralist philosophies of science. Some philosophical pluralists see the increase of extra-academic collaboration and participation in science as a potentially positive development. However, certain views promoted in the non-philosophical literature on extra-academic TD appear problematic in the light of the pluralistic discussions. For instance, the literature on TD appears to be overly optimistic with regard to integration, and the notion of knowledge systems used in it is problematic. We believe it would be worthwhile for scientific pluralists sympathetic to the aims of TD to look more closely into the complex settings in which extra-academic collaboration and participation happens in actual TD projects, and to offer constructive criticisms, exploiting insights developed within pluralist philosophy of science. (shrink)

The ideas of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity have been widely applied to the relationship between sciences. This article is an attempt to discuss the reasons why scientific interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity pose specific problems. First of all, certain questions about terminology are taken into account in order to clarify the meaning of the word ?discipline? and its cognates. Secondly, we argue that the specificity of sciences does not lie in becoming disciplines. Then, we focus on the relationship between sciences, and (...) between sciences and technologies: we argue that multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are a common practice among strict sciences and technologies. Finally, we discuss the different meanings of transdisciplinarity when it is applied to sciences. (shrink)

The dense prose in Signs Grow by the distinguished semiotician Floyd Merrell draws on and connects multiform sources and repeatedly demands extremely careful reflection and interpretation by the reader, and so it illustrates a point often taken to be a hermeneutic truism, that the incipient meaning created by the reader is most probably very different from the meaning intended by the author. Fortunately not totally different, however. Shared meanings may increase by expanded access to common background knowledge, which is always (...) a challenge in interdisciplinary discourse, where the presuppositions and styles of reasoning are only partly shared. Even the most polymathic semiotician must, as any of his readers, face the constraints of background knowledge and special education, limits that can only be completely transcended by gods, demons, or some ultimate interpretant of the semiotic web itself. (shrink)

An apparent conflict between preferences for hierarchical as opposed to distributed organizations is evident in arguments about disciplinary and interdisciplinary organization. It characterizes as well a wide array of other arenas ranging from the biological to the political. In this article, parallels between biological, neurobiological, and social observations are explored in an effort to outline a general approach that may be useful in thinking about interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary activities as well as forms of social organization in general. A key element (...) in the approach is an ongoing individual and collective process of story creation, sharing, and revising. The article is offered both as a contribution to better understanding interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work and as an illustrative example of the potentials and problems of such work. (shrink)

One of the more sustained efforts to think beyond current academic structures has been launched by CIRET, the International Centre for Transdisciplinary Research, in Paris. This centre was involved in the First World Congress of Transdisciplinarity, in Portugal, 1994, and another international congress in Locarno, Switzerland, in early May 1997. They have a project with UNESCO on transdisciplinarity, and are involved in the World Conference on Higher Education, to be held in Paris at the end of September 1998.

Despite the continuous emphasis on globalization, we witness increasing divisions and divisiveness in all domains of human activities. One of the reasons, if not the main one, is the intellectual fragmentation of humanity, compared in the title to the failed attempt at building the Biblical Tower of Babel. The attempts to reintegrate worldview, fragmented by the specialization of education and expected to be achieved through reforms in curricula at all levels of education, were based on the assumption that the design (...) of a curriculum should focus on the wide distribution of subjects of study, as if the distribution was the goal. The key point is not the distribution of themes, but the development of skills in the integration of knowledge. The quantitative assessment of the width of knowledge by the number of disciplines is of secondary importance. We cannot expect the miracle that students without any intellectual tools developed for this purpose would perform the job of integration, which their teachers do not promote or demonstrate, and which they cannot achieve for themselves. There are many other reasons for the increasing interest in making inquiries interdisciplinary, but there is little progress in the methodology of the integration of knowledge. This paper is a study of the transition from multidisciplinarity to interdisciplinarity, and further, to transdisciplinarity, with some suggestions regarding the use of methodological tools of structuralism and the choice of a conceptual framework. (shrink)

Contemporary sociosemiotics is a way to transcend borderlines between trends inside semiotics, and also other disciplines. Whereas semiotics has been considered as an interdisciplinary field of research par excellence, sociosemiotics can point directions at transdisciplinary research. The present article will try toconjoin the structural and the processual views on culture and society, binding them together with the notion of signification. The signification of space willillustrate the dynamic between both cultures and metacultures, and cultural mainstreams and subcultures. This paper pays attention (...) to the practice of sociocultural semiotisation of space and territorialisation by diverse examples and different sociocultural levels that imply semiotic cooperation between several members of groups that can be characterised as socii. We analyse territorialisation by graffiti, by furnishing spatial environment through artistic manners, by shaping the semiotic essence of cities through naming, renaming and translating street names, by pinning and structuring territories with monuments, by landmarking and mapping cultural space through individualisation of cities. We will see how principles of semiotisation of space are valid on different levels (individual and social, formal and informal, democratic and hegemonic, cultural and subcultural) and how these principles form a transdisciplinary object of study as ‘semiotisation of space’, and how space can be regarded as a genuinely transdisciplinary research object. Individual, culture, and society are connected in such an object both as constituents and as a background of study. (shrink)

(2013). Complexity and Transdisciplinarity: Reflections on Theory and Practice. World Futures: Vol. 69, The Complexity of Life and Lives of Complexity, pp. 200-230.

This paper begins with a brief survey of recent attempts to identify the nature of Beauvoir’s contested relation to philosophy. It then discusses the transition from her early, more conventionally philosophical essays to her much more unconventional great work The Second Sex. It argues that the philosophical innovations of The Second Sex were dependent on Beauvoir’s relations to other disciplines and intellectual fields, such that Beauvoir’s philosophical originality has interdisciplinary conditions of possibility. The paper then argues that The Second Sex, (...) like feminist and gender theory more generally, has more in common with the twentieth-century tradition of critical theory than with any ‘disciplinary’ conception of philosophy. The paper concludes that, as the meeting point of critical theory and feminism, The Second Sex can best be seen as an example of ‘philosophical transdisciplinarity’, paving the way for the late-twentieth and twenty-first traditions of gender theory. (shrink)

A couple of decades ago natural phenomena began to be approached from a comprehensive and transdisciplinary point of view, as it was understood that living beings and their environments are not linear but complex. There is no doubt that this perspective of visualizing complexity and working inter-and transdisciplinarily has to be applied. The reflection on the theoretical observation (i.e. meta-observation) involved in the concept of poly-contexturality is the framework in which a theory of complex systems is possible, which in turn (...) enables an observation that oscillates (a concept of chaos theory) between modelsstructured in a hierarchical order (normally linked to a logical-deductive formalization) and models structured in hetero‐hierarchy. And this would allow this reflection to be done in a formalized language that does not follow either the principles of the Aristotelian logic or the postulates of the Kantian transcendental reflection. It is precisely this liberation from the dictates of mono-contextural logic what paves the way to an observation of complexity, in which one or the other language is used to model the states of things, such as the epistemological problems of molecular biology or the social systems. And-what is gaining relevance-it also paves the way to a true transdisciplinary meta-observation, since each discipline chooses its own contexture and only the use of poly-contexturality makesit possible to formulate transdisciplinary relationships within the framework of such meta-logic. (shrink)

In the introduction we explain why the relation between the Object and the Subject is a crucial problem of philosophy. The key point in understanding the Object-Subject relation is the vision on Reality that humans shared in different periods of the historical time. We next describe some historical aspects concerning the transdisciplinary concept of “level of Reality”, namely in relation with the work of John of the Ladder, Nicolai Hartmann and especially Werner Heisenberg. We finally analyze a unified theory of (...) levels of Reality - the transdisciplinary approach, with its three axioms: levels of Reality, logic of included middle and complexity. We describe an important consequence of the transdisciplinary approach: the existence of a zone of non-resistance, which plays the role of a third between the Subject and the Object. This Hidden Third is an interaction term which allows the unification of the transdisciplinary Subject and the transdisciplinary Object while preserving their difference. (shrink)

Las reflexiones transdisciplinares de este artículo estudian la relación entre naturaleza, ciencia y religión. Se dirigen a fenómenos complejos de nuestra realidad ontológica desde una perspectiva donde ciencia y religión se funden para dar paso a la filosofía cosmoderna. Como resultado, surge una ética global para reinventar lo sagrado como producto de la integración entre cosmovisiones religiosas y científicas. También se describe un diálogo interreligioso e intra-religioso donde la naturaleza y el cosmos constituyen el encuentro entre conocimiento científico y religioso. (...) En resumen, el enfoque cosmoderno sostiene que aprender a co-evolucionar conscientemente requiere el desarrollo de una ecología de saberes, donde el conocimiento físico externo y la sabiduría espiritual interna convergen y se complementan en diferentes niveles de nuestra experiencia. (shrink)

This article uses an autobiography as an object of research, to both illustrate some principles of chaos theory in analytic practice, and give those ideas a personal and social context, thereby producing a unique but explanation-rich history of chaos theory and recent intellectual history of transdisciplinarity and social research in the West. The ideas from Chaos Theory it uses and illustrates include: three-body analysis (Poincaré); fractals (Mandelbrot); fuzzy logic (Zadeh); and the butterfly effect (Lorenz).

This article analyses Guattari's and Latour's bodies of work as radical developers of a processual and ontological transdisciplinarity. These works impose a definitive break from the history that, in the 1960s, had drawn upon structuralism in order to oppose philosophy with an epistemological revolution from the perspective of a scientific problematization and first transdisciplinary reconfiguration of the sciences de l'homme. It is shown that the second anti-structuralist transdisciplinarity affirms as its raison dêtre "the necessity to return to Pragmatics", (...) to enact the new significance of the transversal constructions liberated by the rhizomatic monism of a hybrid social ontology. Between Guattari, Latour, and the ecologization they share, a total de-epistemologization and re-ontologization is engaged. It leads to the fall of the 'Ontological Iron Curtain' erected by the philosophical tradition between mind and matter, nature and society. The article concludes by critically addressing the final statements of both Guattari and Latour towards a new aesthetic paradigm and a new diplomacy of institutional forms respectively. (shrink)

Psychosocial studies is a putatively ‘new’ or emerging field concerned with the irreducible relation between psychic and social life. Genealogically, it attempts to re-suture a tentative relation between mind and social world, individual and mass, internality and externality, norm and subject, and the human and non-human, through gathering up and re-animating largely forgotten debates that have played out across a range of other disciplinary spaces. If, as I argue, the central tenets, concepts and questions for psychosocial studies emerge out of (...) a re-appropriation of what have become anachronistic or ‘useless’ concepts in other fields – ‘the unconscious’, for instance, in the discipline of psychology – then we need to think about transdisciplinarity not just in spatial terms but also in temporal terms. This may involve engaging with theoretical ‘embarrassments’, one of which – the notion of ‘psychic reality’ – I explore here. (shrink)

The philosophical logic of Stéphane Lupasco, based on the principles of dynamic opposition and a law of the included middle, offers a needed alternative to the still quasi-exclusive application of classical, binary logic to post-classical natural and social sciences, art theory and political and social action. The system of Lupasco, extended by Basarab Nicolescu by the principle of levels of reality, is grounded in the major discoveries in quantum physics, biology, mathematics and systems science of the twentieth century. It leads (...) to a conception of the unity of knowledge and to a rigorous description of the dynamics of the highest human faculties of consciousness, art and social justice. As one of the ‘pillars’ of transdisciplinarity, this logic provides an interpretation of the fundamental modes of functioning of the physical and mental universes and the emergence of the new reality of ‘cyber-space-time’. The argument is made that an understanding of the underlying logic is essential to the transdisciplinary perspective, practice and attitude. The concepts of Lupasco and Nicolescu are thus relevant to issues discussed in Technoetic Arts. (shrink)

The Anthropocene is neither the only, nor an entirely satisfactory, model for a twenty-first century ecocriticism. My paper tests the Anthropocene from within Anglophone theory that seeks to recuperate what has been historically marginalized: the feminine, the body, the nonhuman and the unconscious. It is possible to evade the heroic masculinist overtones of the Anthropocene by dis-membering him. Using two apparently discrete modes of fracturing—the psychoanalysis of C. G. Jung and the transdisciplinarity of Basarab Nicolescu—, I suggest a dismembered (...) body of knowing that leaves room for the other as that which cannot be rationally controlled. Dionysus in his bisexual dismemberment can help us re-member a different kind of relation to our planetary home. (shrink)

In this paper, the need of increasing transdisciplinarity research is advocated. After having set out some peculiarity of transdisciplinarity compared with related concepts such as multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, four evolutionary stages of scientific disciplines, based on a model recently proposed are presented. This model is then applied to the case of Plant Physiology in order to attempt an evaluation of the potential for transdisciplinary engagement of the discipline, and each of the four stages of the discipline is evaluated. (...) In conclusion, some future perspectives of Plant Physiology are sketched with reference to its transdisciplinary potential. (shrink)

Disciplines have a way of imprisoning their creations. Entrenched in an incommensurable discourse, ideas grow stagnant. Whether ideas transcend this imprisonment is a matter of adapting, flexing, and mobilizing knowledge. This is the aim of Situating Science: Cluster for the Humanistic and Social Studies of Science. Promoting transdisciplinarity among researchers, stakeholders, and the public, the Cluster brings diverse groups of scholars to sit around a common table and discuss a common theme. My aim in this short review is to (...) capture some of the central themes and discussions of two such workshops, one on empathy, the other evidence-based medicine. Both workshops provided a fascinating multidisciplinary perspective on topics that easily transcend disciplinary boundaries. Yet the divisions between participants were clear, leaving some discouraged about producing collaborative work. As both workshops boasted a broad range of speakers and participants, my challenge has been to identify common themes without diminishing or disregarding this multiplicity of perspectives. I have only sought to highlight some of the most thought-provoking ideas. (shrink)

The current neurosciences contribute to the construction of gender/sex to a high degree. Moreover, the subject of gender/sex differences in cognitive abilities attracts an immense public interest. At the same time, the entanglement of gender and science has been shown in many theoretical and empirical analyses. Although the body of literature is very extensive and differentiated with regards to the dimensions of ‘neuroscience of gender’ and ‘gender in neuroscience’, the feeding back of these findings into the field of neuroscience remains (...) a desideratum. Especially, the question of how gender knowledge, i.e. insights from feminist theory on gender/sex and from gender and science studies on knowledge production, may be integrated and applied within the neurosciences has been strongly neglected. Presumably due to their epistemic culture and epistemological presuppositions, these critical engagements are conceived as externalist by critical scholars and neuroscientists alike. In this context, the question arises of how substantiated gender knowledge may be accounted for in neuroscientific research practice? The article outlines methodological considerations for a critical research agenda in the cognitive neurosciences. I present thoughts on how insights and expertise from gender and science studies can be taken into account in the neuroscientific practice of knowledge production. Starting from the assumption that changes in neuroscientific research practices are possible, my aim is to point out possibilities of integrating gender knowledge into the neurosciences. (shrink)

Lately the concept of flânerie has raised an intense academic debate: The flâneur can be found much more frequently, not only in literary texts and in literary studies, but also in cultural and historical sciences, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and philosophy as well as in the field of popular science. Starting with a review of literary and philosophical traditions and the further developments of the concept of flâneur, this article aims to explore the epistemological implications of flânerie and to read them (...) both in a transdisciplinary perspective and in terms of complexity theory. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 571-588.

Questions about what experts need to know to facilitate their collaboration in interdisciplinary situations are usually answered with proposals concerning the technical methods, epistemic ground rules, and explanatory theories that one applies “across” disciplines, just as such methods, rules, and theories are applied “within” a discipline. However, phenomenology offers something better. Instead of following the traditional route of looking for general conditions that apply to collaborative practice, phenomenology turns to what actually happens in collaborative experience and shows that success is (...) not just a function of applied procedures, even when they are in play. Instead, individual experts seem to rediscover their ability to keep their thoughts and concepts looser, more informal, and open-endedly responsive to the situation—just as they did when they first began to shape unfamiliar circumstances into a regionally shared practice—only now with potentially interdisciplinary circumstances as their experienced phenomenon. By cultivating an awareness of how it is with life prior to its being variously studied, exploited, or harnessed to explanatory theories and essentialist ideas, they remain open to becoming expert collaborators, just as they are already regional experts. An example of this process is given from the authors’ recent field research. (shrink)

Questions about what experts need to know to facilitate their collaboration in interdisciplinary situations are usually answered with proposals concerning the technical methods, epistemic ground rules, and explanatory theories that one applies “across” disciplines, just as such methods, rules, and theories are applied “within” a discipline. However, phenomenology offers something better. Instead of following the traditional route of looking for general conditions that apply to collaborative practice, phenomenology turns to what actually happens in collaborative experience and shows that success is (...) not just a function of applied procedures, even when they are in play. Instead, individual experts seem to rediscover their ability to keep their thoughts and concepts looser, more informal, and open-endedly responsive to the situation—just as they did when they first began to shape unfamiliar circumstances into a regionally shared practice—only now with potentially interdisciplinary circumstances as their experienced phenomenon. By cultivating an awareness of how it is with life prior to its being variously studied, exploited, or harnessed to explanatory theories and essentialist ideas, they remain open to becoming expert collaborators, just as they are already regional experts. An example of this process is given from the authors’ recent field research. (shrink)

Recently there has been an upsurge in interest concerning the relationship between religion and international relations. Much of this has been expressed as if the relationship between these was entirely new. In contrast, this paper involves the argument that it is not so much a question of religion returning but rather why it is that students of international relations have neglected the connection since the Peace of Westphalia. This neglect has largely occurred because of the primacy given to changes and (...) events in the West, particularly since the formal separation of church and state and its imposition on or emulation by Eastern societies. The recent concern with globalization has provided the opportunity to undertake historical dis­cussion in new perspectives which overcome the Western “normality” of the absence of religion in the Realpolitik perspective. Moreover, it is argued that much of the neglect of religion in work on world affairs has largely been the product of the inaccurate and ideologically motivated perception of ongoing secularization. The overall discussion is framed by some objections to the limiting consequences of disciplinarity, particularly the way in which both IR and sociology were rhetorically constituted. (shrink)

Se usa la hermenéutica comprensiva, diatópica y ecosófica como transmétodo de construcción teórica para sustentar la con-formación de los investigadores educativos venezolanos desde la tríada transdisciplinariedad-ecosofía-antropoética, como retos urgentes en Venezuela. Existen problemáticas profundas en el accionar del ciudadano que se conforma en la educación universitaria, ya que el ser humano, en su parcelación del conocimiento, ha olvidado que somos seres biológicos, psíquicos, espirituales, sociales, ambientales, etéreos, culturales, y que cada aspecto no se puede estudiar por separado ya que es (...) un complexus. Todo ello, aunado a la mercantilización, a temas como la inclusión, la pertinencia y la con-formación, junto a la formación docente en los posgrados, se analiza frecuentemente. Se concluye que con la antropoética se debe alcanzar la toma de consciencia que se necesita en la investigación y en la formación de educadores y que, por encima de la mercantilización, existe la responsabilidad social compleja de la formación de ese docente como ciudadano planetario. (shrink)

We propose Edgar Morin’s notion of transdisciplinarity as a complementary educational perspective for preparing business school students in addressing the complex global socio-economic and environmental challenges that our planet has been facing for some time. Morin’s notion of transdisciplinarity spans various disciplines, both within disciplines and beyond individual disciplines. Morin’s transdisciplinary approach is inquiry driven and presents a systemic/humanistic vision and form of awareness that challenges habitually dualistic and simplistic thinking. Morin’s transdisciplinarity is based on a dialogical (...) and translogical principle that extends classical and rigid logic and that helps students to explore and unify concepts of a simultaneous complementary and contradictory nature. Confronting students with different modes of thinking, imagining and feeling can help them to develop greater self-awareness, critical reflection, and creativity; with various frames of reference; and with an openness toward and confidence in engaging in changes needed to address global challenges in a sustainable and responsible way. (shrink)

Within the past 40 years, feminist studies/women’s studies/gender studies/studies in gender and sexuality has effectively grown into a globally practised academic discipline while simultaneously resisting the notion of disciplinarity and strongly advocating multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. In this article, I argue that gaining identity through refusing an identity can be viewed as being a constitutive paradox of gender studies. Through exploring gender studies as a transdisciplinary intellectual discipline, which came into existence in very particular multidisciplinary historical conditions of the (...) feminist movement, I suggest that transdisciplinarity within gender studies takes on a meaning which results in a radical problematization of the academic goal of ‘knowledge production’. Instead of such ‘knowledge production’, transdisciplinarity in gender studies promotes intervention which reaches beyond the concepts of accountability, innovation and corporate management. I argue that Jacques Derrida’s promotion of the Collège International de Philosophie in 1982 in its particular relationship to the tradition of philosophy provides a parallel example of such an attitude. Adding to Joan Scott’s and Clare Hemmings’s insights on gender studies in terms of critique and transformation, I argue that transdisciplinarity as practice of ‘intervention’ is crucial for the construction of gender studies disciplinary identity, based upon apparent non-identity. (shrink)

What happens when well-defined disciplines meet or are confronted with transdisciplinary discourses and concepts, where transdisciplinary concepts are analytical tools rather than specifications of a field of objects or a class of entities? Or, if disciplines reject transdisciplinary discourses and concepts as having no part to play in their practice, why do they so reject them? This essay addresses these questions through a discussion of the relationship between philosophy – the most tightly policed discipline in the humanities – and what (...) I will argue is the emblematically transdisciplinary practice of feminist theory, via a discussion of interdisciplinarity and related terms in gender studies. It argues that the tendency of philosophy to reject feminist theory in fact correctly intuited that the two defining features of feminist theory – its constitutive tie to a political agenda for social change and the transdisciplinary character of many of its central concepts – are indeed at odds with, and pose a threat to, the traditional insularity of the discipline of philosophy. It argues, further, that feminist theory operates with what we should now recognise as a set of transdisciplinary concepts – including, sex, gender, woman, sexuality and sexual difference – and that the use of these concepts in feminist philosophy has been the most far-reaching continuation in the late 20th/early 21st centuries of the critique of philosophy initiated by Marx and pursued by ‘critical theory’. This puts feminist philosophy in a difficult position: its transdisciplinary aspects open it up to an unavoidable contradiction. Nonetheless, this is a contradiction that can and must be endured and made productive. In order to draw out the specificity of the concept of transdisciplinarity at issue the essay begins with a discussion of attempts to define inter- and transdisciplinarity, particularly in gender studies. Arguing for the transdisciplinary origin of the concept of gender, it then suggests one way of understanding its function as a critical concept, before making explicit how this leads to the historical antagonism between traditional philosophy and the critical, transdisciplinary concept of gender and with feminist theory more generally. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore some issues regarding the different modes of generality at stake in the formation of transdisciplinary concepts within the production of ‘theory’ in the humanities and social sciences. Focused around Jacques Derrida’s seminal account of ‘writing’ in his 1967 book Of Grammatology, the article outlines what it defines as a logic of generalization at stake in Derrida’s elaborations of a quasi-transcendental ‘inscription in general’. Starting out from the questions thereby raised about the relationship between such forms (...) of generality and those historically ascribed to philosophy, the article concludes by contrasting Derrida’s generalized writing with more recent returns to ‘metaphysics’ in the work of Bruno Latour and others. Against the immediately ‘ontological’ orientation of much recent ‘new materialist’ or ‘object-oriented’ thought, the article argues for the necessity of ‘different levels of writing in general’ through a continual folding back of absolute generalization into historically specific disciplinary crossings and exchanges; something suggested by but never really developed in Derrida’s own work. (shrink)

El trabajo titulado "Ojo. Una mirada transdisciplinar", realizado por profesor Wilson Andrés Parra, impreso por la Universidad de La Sabana y su Facultad de Medicina, recoge un arsenal de aproximaciones epistemológicas complejas. Sin duda alguna es un esfuerzo de altísimo interés por acercarse a las distintas perspectivas que, sobre el ojo y la visión, la representación y los efectos que sobre la mente y el conocimiento ha permitido este maravilloso y casi perfecto órgano, como portador, y al mismo tiempo receptor, (...) de luz física e intelectual para el género humano. (shrink)

The means-ends rationality has predominated the logic of economic theory and the majority of the suppositions that underly economic models, and it is for this reason that economy as a science is charged with a highly economicist and determinist rationality that favors instrumental rationality and ..

Suelen hallarse diversas argumentaciones respecto del Pensamiento Complejo; pero la oferta se restringe cuando queremos imaginar cuáles son las características que tiene el sujeto que sirve de soporte a esa epistemología. El artículo se refiere a las características del sujeto de la Complejidad considerándolo como un emergente de un modelo teórico transdisciplinar -que también se presenta en esta publicación-. En esta propuesta, el ejercicio de la reflexividad favorece el acceso a metacogniciones que van disponiendo al sujeto a un tipo de (...) convivencia basada en una ‘conciencia planetaria’. (shrink)

In this article, the diagram is used to chart the movement from Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and engagement with structuralism in the 1960s to Deleuze and Guattari's ethico-aesthetic constructivism of the 1970s and 1980s. This is shown to culminate in a biopolitical critique and decoding of philosophy, which is part of the unfolding of a transdisciplinary research programme where art is seen to come ontologically ahead of philosophy.

The paths and the ways: an insight into transdisciplinarity: This is a short study of how the notion of thinking that Heidegger developed in his writing, in the Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking, can be read through a consideration of a Chinese Taoist text Tao Te Ching and the Confucian, though a Taoist inspired text, by Zisi, the Zhongyong, to illuminate the essential nature of openness in transdisciplinarity and the restrictions of disciplinarity of knowing taken as (...) the ritual and rules of methodology. This approach offers a way to understand unconcealment in the onto-cosmology of the harmony of all Being and of personal cultivation which is essential to the ontology of Heidegger. I then suggest how this might be offered in what could be called a transdisciplinary pedagogy. Key words: Heidegger. Confucianism. Taoism. Transdisciplinarity. Harmony. Os caminhos e os meios: uma visão da transdisciplinaridade Resumo: Este é um breve estudo sobre como a noção de pensamento que Heidegger desenvolveu em seus escritos, em Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking [Uma Conversa no Caminho do Campo sobre o Pensar], pode ser lida através da consideração de um texto taoísta chinês Tao Te Ching e de um texto confucionista, embora inspirado por taoístas, de Zisi, o Zhongyong [A Doutrina do Meio], para iluminar a natureza essencial da abertura na transdisciplinaridade e as restrições da disciplinaridade do conhecimento a serem tomadas como ritual e regras da metodologia. Essa abordagem oferece uma maneira de entender a desocultação na ontocosmologia da harmonia de todo o Ser e do cultivo pessoal, essencial à ontologia de Heidegger. Sugiro então como isso pode ser oferecido no que poderia ser chamado de pedagogia transdisciplinar. Palavras-chave: Heidegger. Confucionismo. Taoísmo. Transdisciplinaridade. Harmonia. Los caminos y los medios: una visión de la transdisciplinariedad Resumen: Este es un breve estudio de cómo la noción de pensamiento que desarrolló Heidegger en sus escritos, Conversación sobre un camino rural sobre el pensamiento, puede leerse mediante la consideración de un texto chino taoísta Tao Te Ching y un texto confuciano, aunque inspirado por los taoístas de Zisi, el Zhongyong [La Doctrina del Medio], para iluminar la naturaleza esencial de la apertura en la transdisciplinariedad y las limitaciones de la disciplina del conocimiento a tomado como ritual y reglas de metodología. Este enfoque ofrece una forma de entender la falta de cultivación de la ontocosmología de la armonía de todo Ser y el cultivo personal, esencial para la ontología de Heidegger. Luego sugiero cómo se podría ofrecer esto en lo que podría llamarse pedagogía transdisciplinaria. Palabras clave: Heidegger. Confuciano. Taoísmo. Transdisciplinariedad. Armonía. Data de registro: 30/07/2020 Data de aceite: 21/10/2020. (shrink)