Organisation
Centre Leo Apostel
Research Group
CLEA investigates the possibilities of interdisciplinary research, concentrating on the search for integrating world views. In a rapidly changing and complex society, scientific, social, and cultural knowledge is fragmented. This fragmentation leads to a growing gap between the exact sciences and the humanities (the two cultures), and between the layman and the specialist in general. Even more it entails the alienation of humankind from his surrounding nature/culture. The contemporary explosion of information further widens the gap between humankind and its fields of inquiry. CLEA's goal is to look for an integration of different approaches of reality, without the loss of specialised insight, but rather combining them into `world views' (views on the whole of reality). Therefore, CLEA analyses the conditions for such world views from an interdisciplinary point of view, enabling scientists from different disciplines to work together. They investigate possible conditions (methods and concepts) of integration of different fields of inquiry, enabling interdisciplinary exchange and communication between science and the humanities, between layman and specialist. The most recent insights and results in different disciplines are incorporated in this investigation. The investigations are concentrated in thematical projects: (1) the layered structure of reality, (2) the problem of change and synthesis, (3) the evolution of complexity, (4) the differences and similarities between science and art, (5) the evolution of historical world views, (6) the emergence of cognitive and social structures, (7) time and space in science and society, and (8) the development of interactive statistics.