Scholasticism with a transdisciplinary attitude

Abstract

This paper considers how we might understand Nicolescu’s transdisciplinary approach to being in the world through a scholastic metaphysics, to ground Nicolescu’s ontology in a different historic epoch.  By way of interpretation, I want to suggest that Nicolescu’s three axioms of multiple levels of reality, the hidden third and the logic of the included middle emergent in complexity can be enriched by Duns Scotus’ notion of univocity and formal distinction.  Patterning together, they offer a metaphysics basis of transdisciplinarity which is not reliant on a scientific rationality for its feasibility (nor being in competition with such a deconstructing position) through the rigour of the scholastic method.  It takes as it focus the idea of a transdisciplinary attitude and suggests that Scotist realism, and scholasticism more generally, could provide an illuming way of viewing a transdisciplinary educational project. This is a speculative paper is about being, potentiality and the framing of being within the paradigm of metaphysical scholasticism inspired by the transdisciplinary maxims axioms of Nicolescu[1].

[1] The axioms were first formally discussed in Nicolescu’s Nous, la particule et le monde [2}  For an excellent discussion of Nicolecsu’s vision and that of others in the field of transdisciplinarity, see McGregor, 2015) [3]