Interdisciplinarity, History and Cultural Encounters

Interdisciplinarity has entered the agenda of researchers, teachers and policy makers and will remain there in the future. This does not mean that interdisciplinarity is understood the same way, let alone is appreciated everywhere. Researchers are challenged by increasingly complex problems in culture, nature and society beyond disciplinary boundaries; higher education has to cater to a volatile job market where known disciplines no longer define their own niches in terms of topics or practices for their candidates; and decision makers are confronted with challenges that do not respect ideologies of political parties and reports based on mainstream knowledge. In this context, interdisciplinarity is an ongoing re-consideration of the creation, the communication and the application of knowledge uniting the perspectives of research, teaching and decision making. While most discussions on interdisciplinarity focus on its theoretical and methodological complexity in an exclusively contemporary perspective, this article will discuss interdisciplinarity in a historical perspective as central to European history of knowledge as well as in an intercultural perspective.