Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

This essay provides a general overview of Meek’s central arguments in Contact with Reality, focusing on her interpretation of Polanyi’s notion of “contact with reality” as it pertains to the viability of a distinctly Polanyian brand of realism. Special attention is given to Meek’s treatment of “indeterminate future manifestations” as the core of Polanyi’s epistemic realism and the implications of this for a theory of truth.

In the first part of Contact with Reality, Meek provides a justification for Polanyi’s realism, a justification she suggests Polanyi himself did not fully articulate. In the second part of Contact with Reality, Meek explores her own shift in thinking about realism, one that relieves Polanyi of the burden of justification. I argue Polanyi’s account of the reality of persons and their evolutionary history—what he calls “ultrabiology”—provides the foundation of his epistemology and thus his realism.

It some important ways, Meek’s Contact with Reality (2017a) starts where Dreyfus and Taylor’s (2015) Retrieving Realism ends. What is at stake for Polanyians is the status of evolving metaphysical views anchored in Polanyi’s epistemic concerns. I sketch three metaphysical pictures, then focus on dialectically engaging with Meek in hopes of widening the dialogical space for differing Polanyian projects.

This article uses Charles Taylor’s exposition of different forms of meaning as a way of analyzing some of the central themes of Esther Meek’s account of realism. The perspective Taylor provides encourages revisiting the way various elements of Meek’s argument align with one another, and helps highlight the importance of embodiment and the centrality of the person for all accounts of knowing and being.

In this essay I respond to the assessments of my Contact with Reality provided by Stewart, Héder, Takaki, and Grosso. I clarify the book’s agenda as posing what I call the fundamental question of realism, i.e., whether reality is there. I distinguish this question from various realisms that describe specifics about what reality is like and how we through our knowing interact with it. This fundamental question exercises logical priority, has existential importance, and is timely in response to modernist epistemology. In addition to this question, my book also is motivated by what I call the “lodestar” of Polanyi’s epistemology: subsidiary/focal integration, issuing in contact with reality, with concomitant indeterminate future manifestations. Various decisions I made in Contact with Reality and my engagement of Polanyi’s work have generally been motivated by these two concerns. I conclude by responding selectively to specific matters raised by each interlocutor.

This well-organized collection invites us to engage Poteat’s post-critical understanding of personhood. The essays on philosophical anthropology call us to responsible personhood as they focus on various topics, including Poteat’s teaching, the meaning of post-critical and how and when we should think critically, and the importance of place. The three essays engaging theology share a theme of our grounding through our embodiment in a relational, incarnational world. The final two essays, the last by Poteat, focus on Cézanne’s paintings as a thick material and mental enactive mindbodily process, in which the paintings “think themselves” in Cézanne and in the viewer.

William Poteat’s work took Michael Polanyi’s post-critical thinking into humanistic fields. This paper explores some of the reflections of current philosophers on Poteat’s contributions.