A decade ago, I was recruited by the University of Amsterdam to help designand develop Future Planet Studies, an interdisciplinary Bachelor'sprogramme that takes as its point of departure the challenges related tosafeguarding a sustainable future for humankind on our planet. The issuesinvolved – such as climate change, energy, food and water demand– are so complex and so difficult to resolve that they have beencalled persistent or ‘wicked’ problems. Assembling expertsfrom various fields of science for the programme was a challenging yetrewarding task. We needed to gather together human geographers and politicalscientists as well as earth scientists and ecologists, not to mentionexperts on the economic and communications aspects of the various issues. Mybackground in philosophy of science and psychology proved useful – ithelped me understand the different positions held by the professors andlecturers. Realising that their positions could vary significantly, I paidclose attention to the different ways they perceived the challenges, bothwith regard to the actual problems and to the development of a completelynew curriculum that broke with conventional academic rules and regulations.Only by taking these various perspectives into account could we hope todevelop a suitable curriculum, i.e. an educational programme designed toaddress the complex problems that represent the central focus of thisprogramme.

When I was given responsibility for a course on philosophy of science andvision development within the programme, I faced similar challenges. It wasdifficult to find appropriate material. Traditional books on philosophy ofscience offer relatively few answers to many of today's questions.Either they focus on the natural sciences or the social sciences or thehumanities; they rarely cover more than one domain. Yet we need to examineall of these and how they interact with each other to be able to find thenecessary integrated approaches to contemporary challenges. Moreover, theavailable books usually focus on the history of the philosophy of science,while our concern is to tackle the urgent complex problems of today andtomorrow. Obviously, knowledge and experience gained in the past provide acrucial foundation for our efforts today, yet our explicit focus is thefuture. We need the latest insights and innovative visions to inspire us tofind viable solutions. I undertook to write this book in the hope that Icould help to fill that gap and meet these needs.