Science, Religion and Polanyi’s Comprehensive Realism

Some Aspects of Polanyi’s Version of Realism

Rethinking Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge: From personal knowing to imagined institutions

Half a century after Michael Polanyi conceptualised ‘the tacit component’ in personal knowing, management studies has reinvented ‘tacit knowledge’—albeit in ways that squander the advantages of Polanyi’s insights and ignore his faith in ‘spiritual reality’. While tacit knowing challenged the absurdities of sheer objectivity, expressed in a ‘perfect language’, it fused rational knowing, based on...

The Tacit Victory and theUnfinished Agenda

EDITOR’S NOTE: On April 11, 1991, at the Kent State University conference celebrating the Polanyi centennial, there was a panel discussion which bore the title listed above. The panel included nine persons whose interest in Polanyi’s thought is long-standing; panelists were asked to comment on the relevance of Polanyi’s thought to issues and discussions current in their areas of interest. Five ...

Michael Polanyi and the Philosophy of Medicine Richard

One of the great contributions of the profession of medicine to the twentieth century is Michael Polanyi’s philosophy of knowing yet the medical contribution of Polanyi is barely noticed. Most authors, including myself, commenting on Polanyi’s polymath character note that Polanyi began his scientific career in medicine but early Polanyi turned to physical chemistry. Except for the interesting h...

PoLAnYI’s PResAgeMent oF tHe IncoMMensURAbILItY concePt

Kuhn and Feyerabend have little to say about the thought of Michael Polanyi, and the secondary literature on Polanyi’s relation to them is meagre. I argue that Polanyi’s view, in Personal knowledge and in other writings, of conceptual frameworks ‘segregated’ by a ‘logical gap’ as giving rise to controversies in science foreshadowed Kuhn and Feyerabend’s theme of incommensurability. The similari...