Whereas Richard Gelwick has charged Lesslie Newbigin with failing to distinguish between scientific and religious knowing, Newbigin was concerned to resist a false dichotomy between the two. Ultimate commitment to such a dichotomy must allow itself to be questioned in any authentic dialogue with religion as ultimate commitment.

This article discusses three different approaches to human knowledge. The first is that of Peter Simons, a linguistic philosopher, who suggests that language has an underlying algebraic structure. The second approach is that of Ernest Nagel, a philosopher of science, who maintains that the key to knowledge lies in logical analysis. The third approach, due to Michael Polanyi, stresses the idea of tacit integration of parts into composite wholes. All three employ hierarchical schemes, the first two work from the top down, whereas Polanyi works from the bottom up, using the idea of ‘emergence’ .

Polanyi’s response to Snow’s problem is a two-step strategy. First, he undermines the supposed gap between the natural sciences and the study of man and establishes the continuity between them. Second, based upon what is achieved in the first step, he explores the distinctions between scientific and humanistic meanings. All this is achieved on the basis of his theory of tacit knowing. Three features of this theory merit attention: (1) the predominance of the participatory perspective; (2) the recovery of the hermeneutic dimension of science; and (3) the constructive use of Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world.”

Moral inversion, the fusion of skepticism and utopianism, is a preoccupying theme in Polanyi’s work from 1946 onward. In part 1, the author analyzes Polanyi’s complex account of the intellectual developments that are implicated in a cascade of inversions in which the good is lost through complicated, misguided, and unrealistic dedication to the good. Parts 2 and 3 then address two of the most basic of the objections to Polanyi’s theory voiced by Zdzislaw Najder. To Najder’s complaint that Polanyi is not clear in his use of the term “moral,” the author replies that the pivotal distinction in Polanyi’s moral theory is not the moral against the intellectual, but the passions against the appetites. In considering Najder’s complaint that Polanyi’s argument represents a naive instance of ethnocentric absolutism, the author undertakes to show Polanyi’s consistency and perspectival self-awareness by focusing on Polanyi’s account of authority and dissent within a tradition, as well as on Polanyi’s treatment of persuasion as a heuristic passion.

This essay is a brief introduction to four essays exploring the implications of Michael Polanyi’s thought for ethics.

Ethical particularists allege that there are, on account of epistemological limitations, no such things as general moral principles. This paper defends the existence of general moral principles by adapting and appropriating Polanyi’s epistemology of science to this problem in moral philosophy.