The phrase "autonomous discipline" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a field of study or practice that operates independently and has its own set of principles and methodologies.
Example: "The university offers a variety of programs, including those in autonomous disciplines such as philosophy and sociology."
Alternatives: "independent field" or "self-governing area of study".
It covers such topics as whether philosophy is an autonomous discipline and whether its traditional disputes are resolvable.
The work of American political scientists represented an effort to establish an autonomous discipline, separate from history, moral philosophy, and political economy.
There is a genuine philosophical problem about the relation between the world of logic and the world of fact, and it cannot be solved by simply repeating that logic is an autonomous discipline whose principles deserve respect in themselves.
In Neither Physics Nor Chemistry, Kostas Gavroglu and Ana Simões examine the evolution of quantum chemistry into an autonomous discipline, tracing its development from the publication of early papers in the 1920s to the dramatic changes brought about by the use of computers in the 1970s.
Ontology is an autonomous discipline; it cannot (as Quine would have it) be subsumed by science.
In any case, equilibrium theory as an autonomous discipline is misleading.
A less central concern has been whether evolutionary biology and ecology are autonomous disciplines or reducible to molecular biology (Beatty 1990, Brandon 1996, Dupré 1993, Rosenberg 2006).
One long-term process with profound implications was the steady departure of the various sciences from philosophy to form autonomous disciplines.
Many of the human and social sciences have their origins in the eighteenth century, in the context of the Enlightenment (e.g., history, anthropology, aesthetics, psychology, economics, even sociology), though most are only formally established as autonomous disciplines in universities later.
Second, this false dichotomy between science and the clinic was also reflected in a Whiggish overconcentration on the emergence of autonomous disciplines in the medical sciences, as if this teleology was necessarily implicit from the beginning of their development.
From the 1920s onward, Eliot's influence as a poet and as a critic in both Great Britain and the United States was immense, not least among those establishing the study of English literature as an autonomous academic discipline.
