ABSTRACT
The conventional origin story of transdisciplinarity (TD) dates to the fi rst international conference on interdisciplinary research and teaching in universities, held in France in 1970. The initial defi nition was ‘a common system of axioms for a set of disciplines’ that transcends the narrow scope of disciplinary worldviews through an overarching synthesis, exemplifi ed by anthropology as a science of humans. Differences appeared, though, in individual elaborations of the concept. Jean Piaget defi ned TD as a superior stage in the epistemology of interdisciplinary relationships based on reciprocal assimilations. He believed maturation of fundamental patterns of thought would lead to a general theory of systems or structures. Andre Lichnerowicz advocated ‘the mathematic’ as a universal interlanguage and common structure, anchored in the deductive sciences of logic, mathematics and information theory. Erich Jantsch, in turn, aligned TD with social purpose in a hierarchical model of science, education and innovation grounded in general systems theory and organization theory (see Apostel 1972).
