Ontology and Antidisciplinarity

My aim in this paper is to open up a new front in discussions of interdisciplinarity. The argument hinges on a crude sorting of kinds of science along ontological lines. I distinguish between the ‘modern’ sciences (more generally: fi elds of practice and their associated artefacts) and their ‘nonmodern’ counterparts. Most discussions of interdisciplinarity focus on combinations, juxtapositions and syntheses of modern sciences. But if one focuses instead on the nonmodern sciences a rather different picture comes into view, not so much of the combination of distinct disciplines but of the eruption of a relatively unifi ed approach to the world across the disciplinary map (as marked out by the modern sciences themselves). The nonmodern sciences, one might say, offer us an antidisciplinary rather than an interdisciplinary spectacle, and that is what I want to examine from various angles here.1