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In this essay, we present Michael Polanyi's theory of knowledge and outline its implications for theory development in organizational research. While Polanyi is best known in the field for his concept of tacit knowledge, we discuss here several other cognate concepts Polanyi has also introduced—notably conviviality, indwelling, tradition and lore, coherence, and post-critical reason—and show how they help us better understand organizational theorizing. Specifically, we argue the following. First, when engaged in theory creation, organizational scholars integrate largely unspecifiable particulars, in search of deepening coherence, by dwelling in a fiduciary framework of previous theory, others' narrativized experiences, and their own personal experiences. Secondly, driven by intellectual passions and commitments, organizational scholars bring about conceptual novelty by seeking to redirect intellectual attention to hitherto tacitly accepted subsidiary particulars, which they seek to reintegrate in novel ways. And, thirdly, since all knowledge, no matter how abstract, necessarily involves skillful action, organizational scholars dwell in scientific practice and, therefore, interiorize—that is, they become subsidiarily aware of—the practice's collective purpose, which they freely and responsibly enact through the exercise of public liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response to Stan Scott's thorough and thoughtful review of my lead essay in American Aesthetics: Theory and Response, I further clarify my understanding of American Aesthetics by emphasizing the dynamic contributions aesthetic concepts and judgments make to all thought and action. American Aesthetics is interpreted to embody both dominant cultural features arising from American historical experience and more universal epistemic features dependent on evolutionary, psychological, and philosophical elements as interpreted by Peirce, James, Whitehead, and Dewey.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Mel Keiser, Professor Emeritus from Guildford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, responds to questions from Paul Lewis about his introduction to, involvement with, and appropriation of the work of Michael Polanyi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Phil Mullins questions Dick Moodey about his more than sixty years of thinking strongly influenced by Michael Polanyi and Moodey's efforts as a social scientist to link Polanyi-influenced thinking with other important thinkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides an exhaustive list (tabulated in the Appendix) of Michael Polanyi's book reviews published from 1939 to 1971. This list was compiled by careful comparative examination of existing bibliographies checked against copies of the reviews recently procured from publications. Our analysis offers a deep dive into the philosophical and historiographical significance of several selected reviews. In examining these reviews, we shed light on Polanyi's distinctive approach. Typically, his reviews are concise pieces. Instead of extensively laying out the content of the books he is reviewing, Polanyi succinctly distills their primary theses and juxtaposes or aligns them with his own perspectives. Philosophically, these reviews are a gateway into understanding how Polanyi positioned his ideas vis-à-vis several seminal thinkers of his era. From a historiographical standpoint, they chart the evolving contours of Polanyi's intellectual journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviewer Martin Turkis focuses on Dale Cannon's intellectual career in relation to Polanyi studies, how he was introduced to the thought of Michael Polanyi through the guidance of William H. Poteat and his publications, what led to Cannon's focus on the meaning and importance of the shift from the critical to the post-critical, and what that shift means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces and explains the anthology The Participatory Turn (2009) as a newly emerging methodology in the study of religion, spirituality, and mysticism that is in substantial agreement with the philosophical orientation represented by Michael Polanyi and, most importantly, transcends the epistemological dead ends and blind alleys to which modernism has recently brought these fields of study. The anthology in question advances a methodology to surpass and replace the regnant "Linguistic Turn" in religious studies, among other efforts, which has tried but largely failed to achieve a principled justification for the discipline(s) of religious studies given the predicament of modernity. The author clearly lays out the predicament in the terms of French philosopher of science Bruno Latour's challenging book, We Have Never Been Modern (1993). According to Latour, we are heirs to an absolute disjunction between nature and culture (as two putatively ultimate forms of explanation), never to be intermingled, and each disjoined from any admixture of divinity and spirits ("the crossed-out God"). For Latour, these peculiar disjunctions undergird Descartes' infamous bifurcation between subject and object, mind and matter. Latour traces the genesis of these bifurcations to a mid-seventeenth-century political/scientific controversy within the Royal Society in England between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes. Despite the disjunctions prohibiting any intermingling, there have proliferated untold hybrids of culture and nature. These bifurcations have de-legitimized religious studies: how are we to take religious phenomena seriously without reducing them to "either cultural-linguistic byproducts, pseudo-scientific objective experiences, or simple dogmatic assertions of belief"? They don't fit either side of the divide. And the so-called "Linguistic Turn," despite its promise, just gets us stuck in the culture/subjective side. The Participatory Turn is a third way beyond the reduction of religious claims to either nature or society via an enactive understanding of the sacred, co-creative interaction of epistemic faculties with the creative unfolding of reality; human beings enact or bring forth ontologically rich religious worlds, the creative enaction (vs. representation) of the world through our engagement of the entirety of our persons with it. The occasion of the Polanyi Society presentation led the author to realize and acknowledge the "tremendous fecundity of Polanyi's thought" in playing a formative role in the creative genesis of his own thinking in all of these matters (he is unsure about Polanyi's contribution to others in his book). Sherman demonstrates that he understands Polanyi's entire enterprise in its own terms. He identifies three aspects of Polanyi's solution to the objectivist double bind of modernity: the epistemic centrality of personal participation, the somatic (bodily) coefficient of knowledge, and the fiduciary and traditioned character of knowledge. He goes on to identify two areas of possible divergence (possible challenges to Polanyi Studies) and two areas in which Polanyi Studies might pose an edifying challenge to Participatory Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews the pioneering anthology, American Aesthetics: Theory and Practice (2020), conceived, introduced, and edited by Walter Gulick--an active member of the Polanyi Society--with co-editor Gary Slater. With contributions by twenty highly qualified scholars and writers, the book takes its origin from a conference on aesthetics and American thought organized by Gulick and Slater. At the conference, the insight emerged that there is a pattern of significant relationships between the arts in America and aesthetic reflections by classic American philosophers. These include Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey. In the course of reviewing the book, I argue that there is another aspect to the pattern of connections between the disciplines of art and philosophy described by Gulick and colleagues. The American philosophers brought out a revolutionary concept of "experience" recognized by the authors but not central to the book's thesis. This concept--called by such terms as "integral experience" and "pure experience"--reveals that experience at its core involves more than the sense data and reflection of modern empiricism. For the Americans, it involves creative agency, experiment, and discovery in its ongoing work of building coherence in the contexts of experience. The concept of integral experience--departing from the dualistic framework of modern philosophy and traditional empiricism--forms a center around which philosophic texts and works of art in the American scene revolve. The idea of experience as inherently creative, made explicit in American philosophy, is also a central principle found implicitly in American art. The innovative nature of this idea may be more clearly understood when viewed through the lens of Michael Polanyi's account of the process of discovery, including the principles of indwelling, breaking out, and the tacit dimension of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the problem of the legitimacy of authority in philosopher Michael Polanyi's thought. Polanyi provides a model of society rooted in the common good that he calls conviviality. Conviviality creates unity amid perspectival pluralism because of its rootedness in a shared moral vision. The crisis of authority results from the absence of moral ideals that provide cohesion in society. The absence of moral ideals leads to the vitiation of conviviality and ultimately its commitment to the common good. The vitiation that occurs leaves nihilism in its wake, the product of expressive individualism and totalitarianism. In this essay, I explore three issues to clarify conviviality's vitiation. I discuss the nature of conviviality in the first section; liberalism's undoing of conviviality resulting in nihilism in the second section; and political authority and power in the last section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay sets out an interreligious noncommittal and ontologically neutral framework or model for comparative study of religion that draws deeply on the participatory and personal understanding of knowing found in the published works of Michael Polanyi, especially his account of indwelling and empathetic knowing. Along the way, the essay presents a variety of innovations relevant to comparative study that open up novel and heuristic avenues for fruitful research and interreligious dialogue. This is a phenomenological approach but does not make appeal to or use of essentialized categories, as in classical phenomenology of religion. It focuses on traditioned, somatic practices in the contexts where they occur and flourish. In this kind of study, empathy becomes a disciplined art; theological and ontological judgments are suspended but not foreclosed; religious 'realities' are not rejected; and religious commonsense generic patterns and structures are noticed and described. The study provides a context for exploring differences and similarities without prejudice. It makes use of the post-critical conception of objectivity developed by Michael Polanyi. A comparison of phenomena from different religious traditions calls for setting them within the same ongoing generic way (generic traditioned practice) of being religious. As its title indicates, my book recognizes six generic ways of being religious, and I share those briefly here. The essay concludes with a case study comparison of The Questions of King Milinda and the Proslogion of Anselm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay treats several essays in the interesting new collection, Normality, Abnormality, and Pathology in Merleau-Ponty, edited by Susan Bredlau and Talia Welsh. I focus particularly on chapters that explore the ambiguous relationships between the embodied person and the intersubjective world. I also explore ways in which Michael Polanyi's ideas might enrich the discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are there aspects of human intelligence that artificial intelligence cannot emulate? Harry Collins uses a distinction between tacit aspects of knowing, which cannot be digitized, and explicit aspects, which can be, to formulate an answer to this question. He postulates three purported areas of the tacit and argues that only "collective tacit knowing" cannot be adequately digitized. I argue, first, that Collins's approach rests upon problematic Cartesian assumptions—particularly his claim that animal knowing is strictly deterministic and, thus, radically different from human knowing. I offer evidence that human linguistic intelligence depends upon embodied forms of animal intelligence. Second, I suggest the development of deep-learning algorithms means that Collins's mimesis assumption (that successfully realized explicit instructions to machines are needed to confirm human-artificial intellectual equivalence) is no longer appropriate; equivalent accomplishment of goals is what counts (as he also concedes). However, persons must realize and integrate many goals and also deal with failures; a general-purpose AI capable of integrating all the needs and goals of human existence resists development. Third, I explain how Michael Polanyi's understanding of tacit knowing, quite different than Collins's concept of the tacit, exemplifies features that are missing in contemporary AI. I make use of evolutionary theory, studies of animal intelligence, biological insights, individual construction of meaning, and notions of human responsibility to argue for the existence of three categories that distinguish human from artificial intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These two Hungarian authors of Guide to Personal Knowledge are in general agreement with the assessments of their work offered by David Alker and Alessio Tartaro. However, they contend that Jon Fennell's criticism of their writing style, while sometimes accurate, nevertheless derives from an expected level of precision from non-native speakers of English that is unnecessary when the language is used as a lingua franca. Moreover, they suggest that underlying Fennell's complaints about language are differences in the interpretation of Polanyi's philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses major works in the history of philosophy. Topics include how philosophical texts have a deep argumentative structure that runs across the entire text, author with a continuous dialogue with contemporary and non-contemporary philosophical ideas and positions in order to support them, and philosophical guides.

What should the philosophical study of religion look like in an epoch of increasing political polarization, cultural ferment, and religious fragmentation? Drawing on the work of Amy Hollywood and others, I argue that philosophers seeking to understand what seem to be incommensurable moral and religious communities ought to attend more fully to the role of spiritual practice and moral formation as irreducible components of certain beliefs and ethical intuitions. However, while such an account might invite a reductive reading in which the object of religious belief is taken to be simply the practice, ritual, etc., I engage the thought of Michael Polanyi to argue that such irreducibly participatory truth claims can be understood to aim at a reality that exceeds the structures of formation and ways of life to which they are indexed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short essay provides some historical notes helpful for understanding what Polanyi first called "rules of rightness" in his 1954 University of Chicago series of lecturess. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, C. P. Goodman invites British Polanyi scholar Richard T. Allen to reflect on his interest in Polanyi's philosophical ideas and share what he believes is valuable in his thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief commentary treats Polanyi's newly found lecture, "Rules of Rightness," as an occasion to revisit some earlier claims I made about the use of rating scales in social science research. It serves as something of an interim report on an ongoing inquiry into what an effective response to social science would look like from a Polanyian perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a recently discovered 1954 Polanyi lecture that was part of a lost eight-part series in Chicago. It develops Polanyi's interest in unformalized personal participation in knowledge. The lecture discusses how normative "rules of rightness" work and Polanyi expands these ideas later in PK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This historically oriented essay treats Michael Polanyi and Marjorie Grene’s discussions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in their correspondence in the 1960s. It traces Grene’s growing enthusiasm for Merleau-Ponty and notes both Polanyi’s criticism and praise for Merleau-Ponty’s perspective in relation to his account of tacit knowing. The essay also comments on Polanyi’s criticism of Gilbert Ryle and his effort to align his perspective with Francis Walsh’s and F. S. Rothchild’s neurophysiological ideas about the operation of mind. I discuss the innovative Ford Foundation-funded conference program, spearheaded by Polanyi and Grene, that brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars interested in transforming the prevailing philosophical paradigm. This project is the context in which discussion about Merleau-Ponty, Polanyi, and other figures flourished and Grene produced a complicated but fascinating set of little-known publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the common holdings of Thomas Aquinas and Michael Polanyi. More specifically, it suggests that Polanyi’s post-critical philosophy retrieves multiple aspects of the preCopernican rationality of Aquinas. First of all, both believe that the faculty of reason is never impartial; it is always committed, driven by the intellect’s appetite for satisfaction. Second, scientific knowledge requires habituation or know-how, which indicates that truth is not rational apart from bodily habitus. Third, reason operates only in a social body, and fourth, science can proceed only by faith in the authority of others. Along these lines, Polanyi relocates the modern scientist in something like a medieval body. Thus, some of Polanyi’s most important ideas are incidental recoveries of the paradigm Aquinas represents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Phil Mullins asks Walter Gulick about what originally attracted him to Polanyi’s thought. What aspects has he felt might be improved and/or further developed? What is the ongoing import of Polanyi’s accomplishments, and where does the Polanyi Society go from here? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Polanyi, along with colleagues at University of Manchester, worked to produce the journal Humanitas, A University Quarterly for two years just after the end of World War II. This essay outlines how Polanyi's two articles in Humanitas and other work on the journal reflect Polanyi's developing philosophical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Similarities between what Michael Polanyi and Daniel Kahneman wrote about the acts of judging and deciding are partly the result of taking seriously the findings of Gestalt psychology. Both men treat acts of judging and deciding as analogous to acts of perceiving. This similarity is the reason that the differences between Kahneman and Polanyi are mostly complementary, rather than contradictory. Among the things Polanyians can contribute to the interdisciplinary field of judgment and decision making are commitment, the from-to structure, and the image of leaping across a logical gap. Among the things Polanyians can learn from Kahneman is a pragmatic distinction between judging and deciding, a distinction between fast and slow thinking, and a heightened awareness of the many ways tacit heuristics and biases lead to mistaken judgments and bad decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I contend that Polanyi's view of metaphor as outlined in Meaning (1975), has important heuristic implications for understanding the way metaphor functions in trauma therapy. I also contend that in his seminal book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score (2014), Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., although he rarely uses the term, relies on metaphor as a vital element in his treatment of trauma victims. Analysis of Van der Kolk's practice further confirms and extends Polanyi's view of the bodily roots of all knowledge. Juxtaposing Polanyi's theory and Van der Kolk's practice demonstrates how unspeakable trauma can be overcome through the embodied metaphoric/linguistic matrix of human speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rating scales that link numbers to verbal labels are ubiquitous in social psychological research and are used to re-express individuals' attitudes on wide-ranging matters in quantities that can be treated statistically. These re-expressions pay tribute to an objectivist framework, but at the expense of eclipsing the powers of personal knowing Polanyi attributes to other minds. This fact comes to the fore in the present paper through an investigation of Polanyi's analysis of linguistic indeterminacy, indication and symbols, and the application of neurological models to persons who are competent to make sense of their own lives. Accrediting the result of this inquiry compels one dedicated to Polanyi's thought to wonder how social psychology ought to be conceived. Clues to an answer appear in the educational bonds formed between mentors and pupils in the transmission of cultural lore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from a relatively brief --but hopefully understandable-- description of Michael Polanyi’s ideas about emergentism and complexity, we will present a perspective of scientific knowledge under the aegis of two of his most relevant maxims: i) we know more than we can talk about, ii) in general, we employ more ideas than we define concepts. We will propose a conception of science from his views on the inexact, tacit knowledge, the self-regulation of science, the network, and the society of explorers in order to show that complexity and emergentism (almost always synonymous with novelty) are guiding threads, rarely visible, that organize such a conception. Complexity and emergentism are theses that express some of the most relevant features of Polanyian thought, since they help to understand the relations between scientific knowledge and the way the society of explorers carries out its actions based on an intertwining between knowledge network and tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social sciences have been divided into departmental silos for far too long, yielding at best partial insights among economists, political scientists, and sociologists. The most influential attempt at integration, economic imperialism, distorted our understanding of processes with looser constraints than among producers in competitive markets. The theory of spontaneous order, first developed by Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek in the 1940s and 1950s, offers a more promising framework for interdisciplinary social theory. It does not rely on unrealistic assumptions of maximizing behavior, unlike rational choice theory borrowed from neoclassical economics. It is compatible with psychological findings on human behavior, recognizes the heterogeneity of resources and constraints in different social orders, and pays attention to historical processes of individual and social learning. Spontaneous-order theory provides a unified framework for four key orders of decentralized human interaction: the cultural, democratic, market, and scientific orders. Each such order is associated with order-specific resources. Order participants face constraints, but these constraints are not always the same, even within the same order. For example, competing producers face relatively tight break-even constraints, which make their actions unusually predictable. In contrast, consumers in a market order or politicians in a democracy face looser constraints. They are not compelled to maximize utilities or votes, but their relatively loose constraints nevertheless make many potential actions infeasible. Consumption requires money and policies require votes and resources. Exact predictions become impossible, but spontaneous-order analyses offer the promise of more reliable pattern predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This response addresses some points raised by Eduardo Beira's review article found in this issue of TAD and suggests new directions for future studies focusing on the economic thought of Michael Polanyi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article continues the forum from Tradition and Discovery 47/1 (February 2021) on Gábor Bíró's book, The Economic Thought of Michael Polanyi (London: Routledge, 2019; 178 pp. Hardback: 9780367245634, £120.00; eBook: 9780429283178, £22.50). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Polanyi introduced the concept of fields in the last several pages of Personal Knowledge. In this essay I examine whether the last-minute addition of fields advances his explanation of anthropogenesis. Polanyi's view of the role of fields in solving problems and discovery plus their place in ontogenesis and phylogenesis is examined and found not to be wholly satisfactory. Alternative explanations of the factors advancing discovery and problem solving are advanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the philosophy of science and technology from a new perspective. The analysis connects closely to the novel approach to scientific research called practical realism of the late Estonian philosopher of science and chemistry Rein Vihalemm. From his perspective, science is not only theoretical but even more clearly a practical activity. This kind of practice-based approach puts chemistry rather than physics into the position of the most typical science as chemistry has a dual character resting on both constructive-hypothetico-deductive (ϕ-science) and classifying-historico-descriptive (non-ϕ-science) types of cognition. Chemists deal with finding out the laws of nature just like the physicists do. However, in addition to this chemistry deals with substances or stuff that is rather an activity typical to natural history. The analysis of the dual character of chemistry brings forward the need to analyse philosophically also the reasons why physics has held the position of the model science so far. The problem unfolds in the context of practical realism. However, some earlier observations concerning the dual character of chemistry influenced us as well, i.e. by Friedrich Paneth, Michael Polanyi and Edward Caldin. More recently, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Jonathan Simon have given their own explanation of why and how chemistry has a dual character. From their perspective, chemistry is a perfect technical science as it aims at applications, literally at producing something new. Bensaude-Vincent and Simon call their approach operational realism. The latter, however, does not differ from practical realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two reviewers summarize and analyze Gábor Bíró's book, The Economic Thought of Michael Polanyi. The author then responds to each. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ford Foundation funded not only the important 1965 and 1966 Bowdoin College interdisciplinary conferences of the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity (SGFCU), but also the many later conferences from 1967-1972 of the SGFCU successor group, the Study Group for the Unity of Knowledge (SGUK). Michael Polanyi chaired the group making these grant proposals and his cultural criticisms and his constructive post-critical philosophical ideas underlay both the SGFCU and the early SGUK programs which Ford generously supported. There is interesting Ford Foundation archival material about these grants and their programs as well as many relevant letters in the Michael Polanyi Papers. This essay focuses on Polanyi's limited role in three SGUK meetings and its decisive importance in shaping late Polanyi publications. It also traces the declining Polanyi's aspiration to work with Marjorie Grene to convene a never realized European SGUK conference (in the early seventies) that used his ideas to illumine the destruction of Europe in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the modern science world scientists are still searching for some kind of ontological and epistemological common ground. In this paper I try to show that we, by the aid of Michael Polanyi's concepts of knowledge, of personal as well as objective knowledge, and his descriptions of the tacit dimensions in the process of knowing, can take some substantial steps toward a better understanding of the contemporary scientific conduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific discovery is an important moment in scientific pursuit, but only a few philosophers of science appreciate this moment as a logical issue. Starting from his understanding that all thought contains components of which we are subsidiarily aware in focal content of thinking, Michael Polanyi puts out his thesis that scientific discovery cannot be justified by a series of strictly explicit operations but by merely invoking deeper forms of commitment in sighting the problem and the vision of reality. This article will delve into Polanyi's notion of scientific discovery in three sections: the first section is dealing with Polanyi's concept of heuristic philosophy which tones that discovery of problem is the primary requisite of a good scientist to vision reality, the second discusses the role of intellectual passions in scientific justification, and the third focuses on the ontological implication of scientific discovery that it guides us to comprehension of something real both tangible and intangible. The article concludes that since scientific discovery involves the creative and imaginative appeal to reality, its rationality must be counted on by its logical structure and personal experiences in scientific community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cryptocurrencies present a disruption to financial institutions, investments, and markets. Should governments therefore allow cryptocurrencies or ban them? How will they affect the flow of money? What form of economic justice should the cryptocurrency market adopt? Who should be involved in the determining of the economic justice? I claim that Michael Polanyi's theories about employment, money, trade, and his overarching sociotechnical vision of society and the economy can help us understand the current labour market challenges and solutions in view of the digital economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Michael Polanyi engages a young audience in a confrontation of worldviews. He is resistant to a form of scientific belief that has defaulted to a naturalism that undermines the human experience of social cohesion. He proposes a return to Christian belief to provide a way toward a better future. But has he given us anything to trust in, other than switching parties with whom to affiliate? Does he actually direct us to consider the contents of "what to believe" or contend that we should believe in the Christian community for better moral outcomes? Is Polanyi's final goal a deeper investigation of "what to believe" or to create a moral outcome he believes is missing? And is morality the final goal of belief?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"What to Believe" is an important, short Polanyi piece that illuminates fiduciary and postcritical elements permeating various parts of his scholarship. This paper explores how Polanyi's message about understanding, believing, and belonging developed in "What to Believe" fits into Polanyi's economic liberalism. It discusses its relevance for his views about agents, markets, and the desirable methods of inquiry into the economy, and ends with reflections on the seeds of this new perspective in his earlier economics film project and its influence on Polanyi's concept of economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"What to Believe" is a brief, hitherto unpublished talk that Michael Polanyi gave at a spring 1947 conference of the Student Christian Movement in Manchester, UK. Polanyi criticizes the way in which modern skepticism undercuts Christianity and what he calls "civic morality" and also promotes a misleading account of modern science. Polanyi outlines and compares the ways in which believing and belonging underlie understanding in science, Christianity and "civic morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay contextualizes Polanyi's 1947 talk, "What to Believe." After reviewing connections that probably led to Polanyi's invitation to make this presentation at the Student Christian Movement conference in Manchester, I comment on Polanyi's effort to compare the connection between understanding, believing and belonging in science, Christianity and "civic morality." The main ideas in this talk should be viewed in relation to other writing from the mid-forties to the early fifties when Polanyi begins to develop his "fiduciary" philosophy as an alternative to what he views as the excessively skeptical disposition of the modern mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I seek to clarify the unruly notion of emergence by describing three distinct varieties. I suggest that it is often fruitful to ascertain whether what emerges is an aspect of the physical world or a matter of novel meaning rather than quibble over whether emergence is an epistemological construct or is ontological in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many contemporary societies, multitudes have used and are still using psychoanalysis to account for their actions to one another, by attributing to them repressed motives as their causes. The significance of this wide metaclinical use of psychoanalysis remains deeply misunderstood, as searchers predominantly treat psychoanalysis as a pure theory (despite the fact that it transformed social interactions), or as an asocial procedure, achieved by individuals escaping the moral requirements of society. To correct our vision of psychoanalysis, I rely on Michael Polanyi's analysis of moral inversion and Charles W. Mills' sketch of a psychoanalytic vocabulary of motives. An analysis of Freud's theory of repression benefitting from those complementary insights shows that it allows contemporaries to assert backhandedly and indirectly their commitment to the cardinal values of an emerging individualist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Polanyi, the Society of Explorers (SoE) describes the ideal form of a free society. He does not, however, provide us with a thick description of such a society. This essay attempts to do so by bringing together his later social and political thoughts with those set forth in his discussion of "Conviviality.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the late 1930s and the 1950s, Michael Polanyi came in close contact with a diverse cast of intellectuals seeking a renewal of the liberal doctrine. The elaboration of this "neoliberalism" happened through a transnational collaboration between economists, philosophers, and social theorists, united in their rejection of central planning. Defining a common agenda for this "early neoliberalism" offered an opportunity to discard the old laissez-faire doctrine and restore a supervisory role of the state. Ultimately, post-war dissensions regarding the direction of these efforts led Polanyi away from the neoliberal core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this brief essay, I respond to three generous reviews of my annotated anthology of Michael Polanyi's comprehensive thought. Where my meaning or Polanyi's thought seems unclear or controversial, I offer my rationale for my usage or interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This well-organized collection offers a blueprint for tracing continuity in Polanyi's lifelong intellectual output. Gulick's Recovering Truths: A Comprehensive Anthology of Michael Polanyi's Writings makes it possible for anyone interested in Polanyi's writings to explore the overall philosophical stance from which Polanyi's thought originates. In addition to key texts from Polanyi's ouvre, the volume introduces the reader to the method by which Polanyi's philosophy transcends disciplinary preoccupations and transforms the post-Cartesian intellectual terrain through the conceptual tools of a post-critical philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]