In an interview Prof. Aisling Kelliher noted that though interdisciplinarity brings disparate fields together to solve a problem or work on a project, it doesn’t necessarily engage the span of the discipline. Transdisciplinarity, however, requires the reshaping and redefining of disciplines; the ‘trans’ refers to transformation because something new emerges to solve a problem that no discipline can on its own.

In an interview Prof. Thanassis Rikakis positioned transdisciplinarity as dealing with the meta-cognitive; as a kind of higher-level thinking in which distinct disciplinary cultures, practices, and habits of mind engage reflective mechanisms and meta-concepts that allow scientists and poets to contribute equally.

Basarab Nicolescu notes that “[T]ransdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline. Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge. As one can see, there is no opposition between disciplinarity (including multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity) and transdisciplinarity, but a fertile complementarity.”