he organized the International Process Network. This organization holds biennial conferences, the tenth of which will be taking place in Claremont in 2015. During his career, Cobb has also served as Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School, University of Chicago Divinity School, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Iliff School of Theology, Rikkyo University in Japan, and the University of Mainz in Germany. He has received six honorary doctorates. Transdisciplinary work Although Cobb is most often described as a theologian, the overarching tendency of his thought has been toward the integration of many different areas of knowledge, employing Alfred North Whitehead's transdisciplinary philosophical framework as his guiding insight. As a result, Cobb has done work in a broad range of fields. Philosophy of education Cobb has consistently opposed the splitting of education and knowledge into discrete and insulated disciplines and departments. He believes that the current university model encourages excessive abstraction because each specialized area of study defines its own frame of reference and then tends to ignore the others, discouraging interdisciplinary dialogue and inhibiting a broad understanding of the world. To combat these problems, Cobb argues that discrete "disciplines" in general—and theology in particular—need to re-emerge from their mutual academic isolation. Theology should once again be tied to ethical questions and practical, everyday concerns, as well as a theoretical understanding of the world. In service to this vision, Cobb has consistently sought to integrate knowledge from biology, physics, economics, and other disciplines into his theological and philosophical work. Constructive postmodern philosophy Cobb was convinced that Alfred North Whitehead was right in viewing both nature and human beings as more than just purposeless machines. Rather than seeing nature as purely mechanical and human consciousness as a strange exception which must be explained away, Whiteheadian naturalism went in the opposite direction by arguing that subjective experience of the world should inform a view of the rest of nature as more than just mechanical. In short, nature should be seen as having a subjective and purposive aspect that deserves attention. Speaking to this need of moving beyond classically "modern" ideas, in the 1960s Cobb was the first to label Whiteheadian thought as "postmodern". Later, when deconstructionists began to describe their thought as "postmodern", Whiteheadians changed their own label to "constructive postmodernism". Like its deconstructionist counterpart, constructive postmodernism arose partly in response to dissatisfaction with Cartesian mind–matter dualism, which viewed matter as an inert machine and