Original Research

Towards transdisciplinary education

Basarab Nicolescu
The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa | Vol 1, No 1 | a300 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/td.v1i1.300 | © 2005 Basarab Nicolescu | This work is licensed under CC Attribution 4.0
Submitted: 11 March 2016 | Published: 17 May 2005

About the author(s)

Basarab Nicolescu, CNRS, University Paris VI., France; Romanian Academy; International Center for Transdisciplinary Research and Studies (CIRET)

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Abstract

The methodology of transdisciplinarity is founded on three postulates: there are, in Nature and in our knowledge of Nature, different levels of Reality and, correspondingly, different levels of perception; the passage from one level of Reality to another is insured by the logic of the included middle; and the structure of the totality of levels of Reality or perception is a complex structure: every level is what it is because all the levels exist at the same time. After giving an exposition of these postulates the author contends that transdisciplinarity does not rest on a transfer from modern science. Instead, modern science, via its most general aspects, makes it possible to identify the postulates of transdisciplinarity. However, once they are formulated they have a much wider validity then in modern science itself, namely they could be applied in the field of education and culture.

It is argued that transdisciplinary education, founded on the transdisciplinary methodology, will allow scientists to establish links between persons, facts, images, representations, fields of knowledge and action.

Keywords

Transdisciplinarity; in vitro and in vivo knowledge; axiom of the included middle; transdisciplinary education

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