This book tells the story of the author’s situation across modern disciplines. This story poses the question of translating ‘chaos’ (nonlinear dynamics) from its home in science in mathematics, to history and philosophy in HASS, including chaos’ unmathematical translation in complexity theory. But, as Interdisciplinarity and the Modern Paradox reveals, there is another kind of translation problem, which is distinct from, but is intertwined with this first one.

To complexity theory’s unmathematical translation, we can now add an untold and unhistorical history of mathematics. And, we also have an unphilosophical, yet suspiciously Kantian, problem of defining chaos in mathematics. Chaos is as synthetic or embodied as it is analytic or thought, and quite delightfully refuses to be theorised in any kind of modern way.

By double-crossing chaos, this book recasts the question of what chaos, scientific determinism, Newtonian mechanics and their critique is and never was across history, philosophy and science. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary intervention reposes the question of modernity, not as a purification, dualism, binary or a crossing problem, but as two distinct, but intertwined (or nonlinear) operations of modern foundationalism. This book transforms the problem of modernity, modern binaries and modern translation problems, as two kinds of questions that drop out of the question across history and disciplinarity.

Dr Fiona Druitt lives a double life across science and the humanities and social sciences (HASS). Dr Druitt holds an honours degree in science (mathematics and physics, with a mathematics thesis in nonlinear analysis) and a PhD in Arts, combining critical theory, continental philosophy, cultural studies and creative writing. She is currently a Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne in Australia.