Hanne Leth Andersen

The Master Programmes and the Roskilde Model

This chapter gives a presentation of the specific structure of the Roskilde University master programmes before and after the adaptation of the Bologna model. The result is a double structure where students can choose between the typical two-subject combination programmes and new integrated master programmes. In both cases, the specific feature is the problem-based approach through project work, which may lead to various forms of interdisciplinarity. The challenge is to find a balance between students’ designing their own education and the university’s responsibility for the quality and the employability of the candidates.

External Relations: Bridging Academia and Practice

Roskilde University defines itself as an engaged university, critically collaborating with external partners. With an interdisciplinary problem-oriented approach, it is natural for both researchers and students frequently to collaborate with external partners, defining problems, creating new ideas and innovative solutions. Over the last decades, however, with the general focus on university education in global competition, research and education have become more generally related to society, welfare, democracy and growth, and politicians and political organizations are showing an ever growing interest in the strategic, administrative and financial planning at universities. No university can ignore the obligation to collaborate with external partners in new types of relations, with regard to research, education and funding. At the same time, in parallel with the massification of higher education, the quality is questioned and continuously evaluated by external bodies. The new systems of accreditation demand a systematized dialogue with external partners.

EDWIN H.-C. HUNG Beyond Kuhn. Scientific Explanation, Theory Structure, Incommensurability and Physical Necessity

This book is dedicated to the memory of Thomas S. Kuhn and, as the author states in the preface, the aim of the book is to explicate and develop Kuhn’s paradigm view of science in a way that interprets science as an objective and rational study of nature. Thus, one of the major goals is to address the ‘paradox of incommensurability’ in a way that escapes relativist interpretations. The key idea from which Hung develops his position is that scientific theories should be understood as representational spaces. Thus, a major part of the book is devoted to studying theories as category systems, representational spaces, and as languages. On this basis, Hung suggests a new approach to incommensurability as alternative to the well-known translational and referential approaches. Hung distinguishes between theories’ internal subject matter understood as their esoteric ontologies and their external subject matter understood as the phenomena that the theories explain. On such a view, it is possible that theories can at the same time be incomparable because their internal subject matters cannot be compared, but also competitors because they both explain the same phenomena. Based on his idea of theories as representational spaces, Hung describes the process of scientific growth, claiming that science develops through two stages: an empirical stage at which the object of science is to establish empirical generalizations, and a theoretical stage at which the object of science is to establish conceptual theories. As a monograph that intends to develop Kuhn’s paradigm view of science, most historically inclined philosophers will be disappointed by the fact that the historical processes that came to be prominent in Kuhn’s work are simply being passed over by Hung. These views on the salience of the historical processes in which scientific theories are always embedded were emphasized in some of