Conceptualizing Philosophy as a Discipline and an Interdisciplinary Field

The point of reference for my analysis is the contemporary discussion on the metatheoretical and socio-intellectual status of philosophy arguing for its interdisciplinarity. The paper examines two ways of conceptualizing philosophy: as a (mono)discipline and as an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary field. Introduction outlines the internal differentiation of philosophy and the basic approaches in the discussion of its status. Section 1, on philosophy as a (mono)discipline, presents the main criteria that characterize the metatheoretical-methodological and socio-institutional status of an academic discipline and points out some variability of the categorization of philosophy in several contemporary typologies of sciences (knowledge). Section 2 presents a critique of the thesis that philosophy is a discipline, offered in texts that postulate its interdisciplinary practice and organization. Section 3 introduces the basic ways of understanding interdisciplinarity used in the literature and, in this context, analyses and develops the thesis that philosophy can legitimately be conceptualized as a transdisciplinary field because of its three characteristics: radical generality, theoreticality, and synthesizing character. Conclusion draws out some metatheoretical and socio-institutional consequences of conceptualizing philosophy as a discipline and as a transdisciplinary field. The paper is the first text in Poland to categorize philosophy as an interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary field based on a discussion of disciplinary and interdisciplinary formations of knowledge.