The purpose of this paper is to discuss ways that a chemistry course could re-position itself by adopting interdisciplinary approaches based on systems thinking and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as overarching frameworks, to give an overview of several challenges that chemistry in higher education is facing and discuss how those can be addressed as a result of this re-positioning. We will be discussing the need for a new type of scientist, one who has a deep understanding of their own discipline but also an overview of the links with other disciplines and is equipped with skills that will help them contribute to the solutions of a very complex system; the human-environment interaction system. Chemists should be part of what is described by earth systems' science as 'the new social contract' between science and society. Finally, we will explore how this can be reflected in the curricula of higher education and we will present a University of Bristol educational initiative, Bristol Futures, that attempts to address this.

This article investigates Marx’s method in the analysis of the circuits of capital, as it is carried out in Capital vol. 2, in an attempt to clarify some key aspects of the well-known problem in Marxist literature on the relation between the logical and the historical. The central question on this topic is whether Marx’s analysis is logical/structural or historical. The approach elaborated upon in this article extends beyond the one-sidedness of both views which deny any kind of correlation between logical and historical sequences and the views claiming that the articulation of Capital’s argument exposes a set of historical stages. We will argue that dialectic, namely, the method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete, represents, first and foremost, the inner articulation of the structure of a given self-developing object, and at the same time implicitly represents its historical development. Hence, taking Marx’s analysis of the circuits of capital as a case study, this article aspires to identify the fundamental movement of the systematic dialectic, which characterizes the entire Capital and explains the fundamental function of the relation between the logical and the historical.