Interdisciplinarity as a theoretical practice

Abstract

NÍSIA TRINDADE LIMA, IN THE ARTICLE 'PANDEMIC AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY:challenges for collective health' 1 , invites the reader to an interdisciplinary exercise, arguing that Covid-19 pandemic is a totally new phenomenon, with tendencies that imply inflections and changes in a direction that is not defined yet. The author addresses theoretical and methodological issues, presenting an agenda of themes for research, action and interventions in the field of sanitary policies. She proposes the valorization of knowledge diversity, in a scientific agenda directed to "present issues and those of a future with an even greater degree of uncertainties" 1(21) .Lima adopts the dialogic interdisciplinary perspective more directed to "the proposition of problems and the search of answers" than to a process "oriented by perfectly defined epistemologies and methodologies" 1(11) . The author emphasizes the practice of interdisciplinary dialogue, recognizing, however, that in the field of collective health this dialogue has been more postulated than actually carried out, because the efforts tend to "hierarchize knowledge", at times diminishing "the importance of social sciences" 1(13) . Finally, the author calls on collective health to provide the definition of an "agenda of theoretical and practical issues necessary to face the current transformations" 1(21) .The practical effort of the interdisciplinary dialogue about the concrete issues is an essential exercise. However, getting close to epistemologies and methodologies of the different sciences might also be inevitable.Japiassu 2 systematizes the three epistemological axes of modern science: rigorous science, biology, and culture and history. The first institutes the mechanistic mathematical model concerned with establishing precise scales and constant relations, having been the axis that established the scientificity model, especially inspired by physics, depriving what became human sciences of their subject and object. The second, biology, affirmed the "irreducibility of life" 2(100) as human presupposition under the theme of evolution, by establishing a "philosophy of nature putting into action the dynamism of life, immanent to matter" 2(100) . Thus, "all history was converted into natural history" 2(101) , in a certain sense; human order became explained by a certain rationality of the sense of life. The third, culture and history, was permeated by the idea of progress of an humanity that "does not constitute a natural species, but a historical idea, a vocation for civilization" 2(102) ; a historicism that systematizes and conditions all human becoming to civilization and progress, and disconnects all social being from nature, "the human being, organic in its structure, is cultural in its development" 2(103) . Therefore, in Japiassu's terms, the matrix of modern sciences imposed to the 'humans' and the natural world a specific rationality, which deprived them from part of themselves and separated them from the natural world.