This paper represents one attempt to implement a post-critical approach to teaching introduction to philosophy, in contrast with the usual approach which serves to re-establish the critical paradigm that Polanyi’s “post-critical philosophy” is meant to challenge and displace. It aims to have students discover their own fiduciary access to reality and rely upon it while slowly building competence in critical analysis of the principal intellectual options in the history of philosophy.

Working from an integration of Michael Polanyi‘s image of learning as self-destruction and Max Weber’s analysis of the ethics of scholarship, the author explores the implications of Polanyi’s argument concerning “the depth to which the . . . person is involved even in . . . an elementary heuristic effort” (367). In the process, the author raises questions about current expectations concerning faculty “performance” and current methods of assessing faculty success in the classroom.

In 1945, Michael Polanyi achieved, in Full Employment and Free Trade, the integration of Keynesian and monetarist economics that the economics profession did not ahieve until the 1970s. In yet another field, Polanyi saw the heart of important matters long before anyone else.

This essay provides some interesting elements of early Polanyi family history as well as comments on Budapest and Hungarian history and culture at the turn of the century. It presents the Polanyis as intellectuals immersed in a worldly environment, led by “Cecil-Mama,” the radical mother of Michael Polanyi.

These remarks are an obituary for William T. Scott who worked for many years on a biography of Michael Polanyi. In addition to providing an overview of Scott’s own life and work, his connection with Polanyi is reviewed.

This paper looks at Wittgenstein’s criticism of metaphysical philosophy and its possible reconstitution through Polanyi’s epistemology of tacit knowing. The two approaches are contrasted in the end in response to the question “What is the meaning of life?”