The dream of a universal or an interdisciplinary science is an old idea that is continually arising anew. Despite, or precisely because of, the increasing specialization of the sciences, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have brought forth numerous visions of a new interdisciplinary science transcending the limitations of traditional sciences mechanistic and analytic thinking. Cybernetics, the theory of dynamic systems, artificial life research and robotics are (or have been) among the hopeful candidates for such a new science. It has been repeatedly attested that these new disciplines could develop a (more) comprehensive language able to bridge the gap between the so-called "two cultures" of the natural and the human sciences. One might cite the example provided by the famous Macy Conferences, in which mathematicians, physicists, biologists and anthropologists cooperated.

Interestingly, the development of new techno sciences like cybernetics, AL research and robotics has had a wide-ranging influence on the most diverse fields of knowledge from natural and technological sciences to human, social and cultural sciences. They have either nested themselves under their own "label" in a great variety of disciplines, established themselves as new and independent interdisciplinary areas of research, or integrated themselves (or been integrated) into other fields. In the latter case, techno sciences like cybernetics, chaos theory and artificial life research gave up their individual "identity" as independent fields of knowledge. Cybernetics, for instance, was influential during the 1960s in a wide variety of areas from medicine, (molecular) biology, pedagogy, political science, sociology and philosophy to traffic planning and artificial intelligence. Today almost no one speaks of cybernetics, but its theorems and products remain present in many fields. In robotics, for example, cybernetic ideas like feedback, regulation and the black box model are booming.

Against this background, what are the perspectives of efforts toward establishing a new interdisciplinary approach and a different techno rationality in robotics, with its cybernetic heritage and its (biocybernetic) future? To what degree are new working approaches or even new forms of rationality to be found in robotics?

New forms of knowledge and knowledge production and new ways of creating artifacts are made possible by cybernetics and robotics. Today many robotics specialists fall back on cybernetics as a resource for ideas in realizing new technological developments. Our symposium will focus on epistemological and ontological affinities and differences as well as those found in the production of artifacts and will put special emphasis on interdisciplinarity and notions of a universal science.