Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

This essay develops aspects and implications of Poteat’s critique of the Enlightenment’s critical paradigm and development of post-critical thinking in dialogue with Pascal in his dissertation and four post-critical thinkers who figured prominently in his project: Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and Polanyi. Then it critiques from a Poteatian perspective the critical, dualistic, discarnate picture that still dominates the academy, especially attending to the cognitive science of religion. CSR involves both a reductive physicalism involving unconscious mental mechanisms and a re-inscribing of subjectivistic or mentalist (alleged) beliefs in disembodied supernatural and human spirits.

Since World War II, political theory has increasingly focused on the question of the origins and nature of the modern age. William H. Poteat’s explication of the Greek and Hebraic ontologies and his argument that modernity is the result of their incoherent combination in Christian theology can provide a framework to synthesize and extend the major competing theories about the modern era.

Three recent interpreters of tacit knowledge, Harald Grimen, Harry Collins, and John McDowell, either deny it is appropriate to attribute knowledge of any sort to animals or ignore the relevance of the tacit knowledge of animals to human knowledge. In this article, we seek to show that in Michael Polanyi’s understanding, tacit knowledge in animals underlies and supports human explicit knowledge. For Polanyi, tacit knowledge arises in increasingly complex forms in evolutionary history, and explicit knowledge emerges from it. Both forms of knowledge are personal achievements that can be true or false; animal behavior is not simply deterministic. Polanyi’s view on non-human tacit knowledge thus explains features of human knowledge that those denying or ignoring non-human knowledge leave unexplained.