Polanyi broke through the notion that science has a distinct methodology and epistemology which sets it apart from the other cultural disciplines (law, medicine, music). When it came time to address the issues of how Christianity functions, however, Polanyi unfortunately lapsed into romantic notions based upon his own ill-informed and marginal participation in the religious enterprise. By way of addressing this deficiency, my study puts forward seven theses designed to demonstrate that everything which Polanyi put forward regarding the transmission of a scientific heritage through a successive series of apprenticeships can be seen as functioning within the religious enterprise as well. Then, when it comes to the role of masters in pursuing lines of inquiry which sometimes lead to self-transforming acts of discovery, such feats can be understood as defining the function of creative theologians and pastors who both exhibit and transform the tradition in which they dwell. In conclusion, my inquiry will attempt to show that, when Polanyi’s own inadequate assessment of religion is set aside, one comes to a proper understanding as to how religious pedagogy actually functions within the Christian enterprise.

This paper suggests that moral neutrality erodes the liberal practices which sustain a free society. It supports the Polanyian claim that a free society is the political arrangement which is best able to realise universal ideals.

The focus of this essay is to read the nineteenth-century theories of poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge against the twentieth century theories of chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi, and Russian philologist and critic Mikhail Bakhtin, showing their intellectual similarities and contrasts. My purpose in this essay is to redeem Coleridge’s thought for rhetorical theory by linking him to modern thinkers who are respected within the field.

Partly in reply to D. Cannon’s critique of my analytical reconstruction of Polanyi’s post-critical theory of knowledge, I argue that there are good reasons for not appropriating Polanyi’s programme of self-identication and the confessional rhetoric which may be derived from it. Arguing that “post-critical”should not be identified with an uncritical dogmatism, I then go on to suggest that the theory of tacit knowing had best be elaborated further by drawingon the work of J. Searle and M. Johnson. Finally, I make use of E. Meek’s account of the notion of “contact with reality”to highlight the Polanyian criteria of truth.

Embodiment is a crucial feature of Polanyi’s tacit knowing. In the following, I synthesize ideas from Polanyi, Johnson and Lakoff, and Merleau-Ponty to further illuminate the embodied dimensions of tacit knowing. I appropriate two widespread embodied structures, image schemas and metaphor, into a Polanyian framework for embodied knowing. I also briefly indicate some important ways in which Polanyi departs from these three thinkers.

These comments reflect upon my doctoral study with William Poteat as a nontraditional student between 1986-92 and also upon the academy and colleageality vis a vis Poteat and “Poteatians.”

This text is the seventh of an eight-lecture series given by Michael Polanyi at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1954. The lecture focuses on the nature of human knowledge of other living beings.

New moral ways of being are answers to fundamental problems in the human condition regarding the best way to be and the best way to be with each other. Entering a new way of being entails crossing a logical gap into a new interpretive framework. Michael Polanyi’s from-to structure of knowing and discovery is used to show both how we can acquire the state of the good person through an imitation of their behaviors and why those behaviors must be practiced for themselves. The good person experiences a happiness that the person pursuing happiness as a goal cannot fully understand. One thus practices virtues, and heeds their codification into law, not for the sake of one’s own happiness, but for the sake of the happiness of the person one will become.

This book discussion focuses on Theodore L. Brown’s Imperfect Oracle. Richard Moodey, a sociologist, and Jay Labinger, a scientist, raise questions about some of Brown’s views on the epistemic and moral authority of science and Brown responds.

This article is a discussion of Philip A. Rolnick’s Person, Grace, and God with comments by Andrew Grosso, Paul Lewis and Paul Gavrilyuk and a response by Philip Rolnick.

Michael Polanyi articulates two arguments against the view that moral judgment has no proper place in the conduct of political science: Non-judgmental political science cannot understand what it studies; and non-judgmental political science cannot understand the political scientist himself. Evaluation of these arguments not only clarifies important dimensions of Polanyi’s conceptions of understanding and tacit inference, it prompts a reconsideration of the nature of both moral deliberation and moral truth. The encounter with Polanyi demonstrates that non-judgmental political science does indeed fall short of its stated objective.

In a Polanyian emergentist ethics, moral ways of being and their concomitant interpretive structures come as achievements in response to a heuristic in the human condition. Religious transformation, as seen in mysticism and enlightenment, however, may present a radical, “transnatural” solution of a different order. Polanyi’s understanding of “breaking out” from conceptual frameworks, and his conception that Christian worship promotes a sustained hopeful anguish, are contrasted with a Polanyian “breaking in” to a new framework of knowing and being that provides a happy solution to human suffering. With a new framework, a new spirit, or center, is seen through that provides a different experience of the world. Polanyi’s conceptions of a telic organizing principle, breaking out, and breaking in provide three different conceptions of God.