ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the antinomies resulted in certain characteristics of the available academic literature. Most of the literature describes interdisciplinarity, its promises, and its problems in a comprehensive and fairly insightful way. It notices a seventh characteristic which was that in the absence of a philosophical metatheoretical justification for interdisciplinarity authors tend to justify interdisciplinarity according to their particular disciplinary focus. Therefore, even when philosophy is not specifically mentioned, there are strands of interdisciplinarity that reflect empiricist and neo-Kantian and postmodern philosophical approaches. A characteristic of the literature is the assumption that a major barrier to successful interdisciplinarity is the personality and individual skills of the researchers. The literature frequently contains bibliometric analysis of measures of interdisciplinarity. These measures include: how frequently interdisciplinary research is published; how often researchers quote publications from different disciplinary sources; or the relations between fields of knowledge.
