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1. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 3

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2. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 3
Paul Lewis

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3. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 3

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the work of esther lightcap meek

4. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 3
David James Stewart

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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.
5. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 3
Mihály Héder

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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.
6. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 3
Kyle Takaki

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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.
7. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 3
Andrew Grosso

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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.
8. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 3
Esther Lightcap Meek

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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.

review articles

9. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 3
David Nikkel

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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.
10. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 3
Richard C. Prust

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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.

journal and society information

11. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 2

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12. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 2

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13. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 2
Paul Lewis

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journal and society information

14. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 2

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the work of matthew b. crawford

15. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 2
Matthew B. Crawford

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The transmission of knowledge requires trust, which is a moral relation between teacher and student. This relation requires the suspension of democratic/individualistic suspicion against the idea of intellectual rank and authority. Ultimately this is for the sake of an end that is affirmable by the lights of democratic individualism: the intellectual independence of the student. But education cannot itself be a democratic enterprise if it is to sustain deference to the idea of truth, as it must.
16. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 2
Paul Lewis

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In response to Crawford’s presentation on teaching and trust, I note how Crawford’s latest book has helped me teach history of Christian ethics. I also highlight two Polanyian themes relevant to the topic: dwelling in/breaking out and intellectual passions. I then discuss additional challenges to developing trust between teachers and students.
17. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 2
Collin D. Barnes

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Matthew Crawford invites readers to consider how their contact with the real world has been imperiled by the notion that all experience is mediated by mental representations and how skilled activities providing bodily contact with the environment help recover us from this mistaken perspective. In this brief presentation, I ask whether in his critique of mediated experience by appeal to physical skills Crawford neglects to appreciate Polanyi’s emphasis on intellectual probes as instruments for contacting reality and whether his doing so inappropriately—and perhaps inadvertently—diminishes the all-important place of belief in Polanyi’s epistemology.
18. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 2
Richard W. Moodey

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Matthew Crawford compares his program of convivial craft-work to Polanyi’s fiduciary program. He argues that both are good ways of grappling with reality, and that both can help persons to focus their attention in an age of distraction. Crawford criticizes the Enlightenment philosophers for an overemphasis on the representations of things at the expense of grappling with the real things. He argues that attention is a scarce resource, analogous to water. He sometimes uses language that can be interpreted as expressing a belief in group minds.

articles

19. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 2
Milton R. Scarborough

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Despite the fact that none of William H. Poteat’s former students on the Yale Conference email list recall ever having heard Poteat mention the Buddha or Buddhism, this article argues for a hitherto unnoticed and striking correspondence of thought between William H. Poteat, the Buddha, and Ch’an (Zen). Both the Buddha and Poteat bear closer analogies to physicians than to metaphysicians and their thought can be compared to a kind of philosophical therapy. While the Buddha’s diagnosis pinpoints egoistic desire as the cause of human dissatisfaction with life, Poteat’s diagnosis is gnostic apocalypticism. Both physicians are moved to employ unusual pedagogical methods in order to effect a “cure,” which consists of a fundamental unity or nonduality of mind and body, a therapy requiring a practice.
20. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical: Volume > 44 > Issue: 2
Jon Fennell

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Among the most arresting images in Personal Knowledge is “the second apple.” Through this metaphor Polanyi describes a fall of man comparable to the expulsion from paradise recounted in Genesis. But here, too, redemption is possible. It comes, says Polanyi, in the form of a maturation of perspective that he calls “balance of mind.” Under this heading Polanyi offers his conception of human fruition, a fruition requiring a loss of innocence that follows from not only departure from the original paradise but also the utter collapse of the allegedly autonomous citadel of critical reason that followed in its train. Interestingly, “balance of mind” has much in common with the Christian life, as understood by Polanyi. Thus, the encounter with “the second apple” is simultaneously both an advance and a return.