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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]

Like architecture, design objects are constitutive parts of everyday life: used in various situations where they gain meaning and value. However, while engaging with objects we often do not focus our attention on them but enjoy their qualities as part of performing some action. The practical and the aesthetic merge, and while vision plays a role, touch is more important. The article suggests that the aesthetics of designed everyday objects need recognize a tacit aesthetic dimension, comprising what figures in the background of experience. Tacit aesthetics is discussed based on Michael Polanyi's ideas about the "from-to" structure of knowledge and perception, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, highlighting the temporal structure of perception. Through examples of Finnish designed tableware from the mid-20th Century, especially by Kaj Franck, it is shown how material, form, and design ideologies interact with patterns of use, informing our aesthetic appreciation and engagement with things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of artificial intelligence is very popular in both science and culture today. Similarly, the concept of emergence has become quite popular during the last decades in the sciences. For example, it is commonplace in the case of machines to speak of an overall blueprint and several different material components; thus, we can regard the blueprint as a kind of comprehensive emergent additive. However, is it true then that the machine, due to this plus component, is not material? Practically nobody wants to acknowledge that. Still, in practice, there are no machines without added blueprints. In my paper, based on Samuel Alexander’s original concept of emergence, I will investigate these problems and contradictions, which stem from the materialist interpretation of the concept, and I will present a coherent emergentist concept of machines, according to which machines are clearly a unique kind between simple material things and living beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines criticisms of Max Weber by Leo Strauss and Mihály Polányi. When we claim that we act on the basis of moral considerations, the same is true for the case when we judge others on a moral basis, and in these cases, we also refer to generally recognised moral standards that we consider to be valid. Are these premodern interpretations of Weber critiques or indictments? Namely: the criticism of objectivity, criticism of historicism and criticism of positivism. Analysing Max Weber, we cannot go beyond Rudolph Sohm’s concept of charisma and Weber’s charisma. Weber was greatly influenced by Sohm, from whom the concept of charisma comes. Indeed, Weber perfected Sohm’s concept of charisma, but also adapted it to his own. Neither Polányi nor Strauss find the theory developed by Weber to be completely consistent. The Weberian system of ideas requires renewal, the steps of which are embodied in the criticism of the two authors Mihály Polányi and Leo Strauss. In this study, I undertake to give the body an understanding soul in which both criticism and the Weberian system of ideas meet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What might we learn by considering the social and literary forms that makeup neoliberalism, and their relationship to the figurations of anthropological thought and writing? Inspired by tropological work in literary criticism and anthropology, this article considers how two terms introduced into the analytic literature by Karl and Michael Polanyi—embeddedness and tacit knowledge respectively—can give us new insights into important aspects of neoliberal practice. In considering the interrelation of these tropes, we can begin to parse out the relationship among several key aspects of the practice of neoliberalism: marketization, audit culture, and quantification; and how these are intertwined in their opposition to embeddedness and tacit knowledge. This article considers what different forms afford for analytic thinking about our present moment, as well as for formulating various protests and oppositions to neoliberalism. [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]

The book The Tacit Dimension by the author Michael Polanyi speaks about the different dimensions of Knowledge of the world in a philosophical context. The author deals with the many facets of Knowledge, knowing its emergence and how society explored it in the three chapters. He tried to enumerate the above things. The book is for insightful reading to an ordinary man who understands how Knowledge works and how different associations of Knowledge are in our society with academic, societal, intellectual, and personal endeavours. The book shifts the reader's attention from intimate Knowledge to a philosophical knowledge perspective. The author finds Knowledge is of different dimensions where it is subjected to every individual's upbringing, perception, sensations, and the way s/he interacts with intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Various paradoxes we frequently encounter in the world are subjected to how things exist, how things appear, and how we perceive them with our information. [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.

Tacit knowing as a concept and legitimate topic of scholarship came up in philosophical research in the second half of the 20th century in the form of some influential works by Michael Polanyi (although similar concepts had been discussed before). Systematic epistemological studies on the topic are still scarce, however. In this article, I support the thesis that tacit knowing pervades all our common major divisions of knowledge and that it therefore must not be neglected in epistemological research. By this approach I am simultaneously giving a systematic back-up for Polanyi's claim that the tacit component is found in all knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite repeated opportunities to reconsider their natural science ambitions, social psychologists have not done so, and there are no obvious signs of this changing. Why? This paper pursues an answer to this question by defining the field after the fashion of Michael Polanyi's thought. According to Polanyi, interpretative frameworks develop from our primitive bodily encounters with the world and then are shaped by language into the vast conceptual systems of our culture. Concerning frameworks erected on our most fundamental beliefs (e.g., science), he says that we "live in [them] as in the garment of our own skin." Frameworks such as this are not objects of critical evaluation but of commitment, and social psychology, as an outgrowth of positive philosophy, is an interpretative framework in this sense. Professionals' recent responses to the field's political makeup and replication failures demonstrate this. They aim primarily at preserving a natural science understanding of social psychology and point to the influence of belief‐stabilizing mechanisms Polanyi finds operative in folk religious practices. These mechanisms appear at work also in psychology as a whole. They are implied, for instance, in the field's resistance to Sigmund Koch's authoritative judgement against its scientific self‐conception in the latter half of the 20th century. Noting this reveals the broader implications of this paper's definition of social psychology, but it also urges questions about truth and relativity that cannot be ignored. These questions are addressed briefly in the end where it is suggested that what psychology needs most of all is a change of heart, and that this will happen, if at all, not primarily through argument and evidence, but through persons who authentically believe in the veracity of a different framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coming from the perspective of embodied or enactive cognition, this article argues for the bodily roots of all tradition. Given that tradition entails a givenness inherited from the past meeting with interpretation/modification/construction in the present, it examines tradition as an aspect of self-organizing cultural, particularly religious, systems, including in situations far from equilibrium. Building upon Michael Polanyi's idea that what we tacitly rely upon becomes incorporated into our bodies, the article takes a phenomenological approach to argue that traditions function as part of our bodies through which we meaningfully engage the world. As such, tradition sets limits to our critical penetration, as much of our knowledge is unspecifiable. The Enlightenment ideal that all tradition is thoroughly contestable – open to explicitation and needing justification – remains strong in the academy. The article examines both the pitfalls of critical reflection and when critical reflection is appropriate or necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

A climactic moment appears in Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge when he describes the modern predicament of humanity as a second ejection from paradise triggered by the uneasy discovery that our knowledge cannot be justified objectively. Polanyi's philosophy is a response to the cataclysmic consequences of this second fall from grace. It seeks to establish a "balance of mind" that yields neither to the Scylla of objectivism nor the Charybdis of nihilism. Such themes are reminiscent of Jungian psychology and the process of individuation, yet there is no evidence that Polanyi appreciated this. That he nevertheless employs metaphors and ideas suggestive of the psychical transformations recorded by alchemists is telling. It raises the possibility that while his work is evidently concerned with epistemology, it is, at another level, a highly sophisticated depiction of psychological growth—both for Polanyi, and for anyone who accepts his invitation to join the opus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the epistemological justification of liberal education for all, and of foundations courses for teachers, set forth by Harry Broudy, the paramount voice in philosophy of education during the mid to late twentieth century. This justification, grounded in Michael Polanyi's revolutionary theory of tacit knowing, reveals that such education and preparation, issuing in a capable and confident person, is entailed by commitment to equal opportunity and democratic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like God, humans are always on the move. Migrating people reflect the imago Dei of God the Earthroamer. Unlike God, humans do not always move with freedom as geopolitical forces, from societal disintegration to war and climate change, force migration. The experiences within migration reflect elements of a "personal knowledge" (Michael Polanyi). This essay recognizes that much of the migrating experience may escape verbalization, which not only impacts migrating people but also the scholars and researchers studying migration. Drawing on narratives in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the essay identifies seven pastoral-theological polarities to describe the migrating experience: Anticipation and disappointment; trouble and restoration; curse and blessing; at home and being a stranger; becoming and continuity of being; articulation and silence; and alone and in communitas. These themes are illuminated by pastoral-theological, cultural, psychological, and psychodynamic theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An inbuilt theoretical deficiency of any cybernetic or phenomenological accounts of human-smartphone interaction is that their inherited frameworks suffer from lopsided explanatory proficiencies. Neither can explicate one 'side' of the interaction without inappropriately foisting those logics onto its dyadic counterpart. In this paper, both Michael Polanyi's bio-philosophy and a Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy of brain seek to remedy this conceptual deficit by positing a conceptual toolkit that incorporates pertinent cybernetic and phenomenological revelations while abjuring their dogmatizing propensities. This conjoined reading of Polanyi with Deleuze and Guattari asserts that temporary, bounded structures of interference between mind and machine – rooted in asymmetry, inertia, and labile planes of cognition – are the grounding dimension of human-smartphone interaction, which is itself taken as emblematic of our wider relations to smart technologies. [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]

This paper examines the evolution of Michael Polanyi's critique of economic planning. It portrays how the focal point of his critique shifted from addressing the 'spirit,' 'social consciousness,' and 'public emotion' of the people supporting planned economies to addressing the administrative 'unmanageability' and the logical impossibility of economic planning. Polanyi developed thought experiments of imaginary economies, contrasted the 'pyramid of authority' with the polygons of liberty, and explained organic (spontaneous order) and inorganic (corporate order) ways of adjusting economic relations. He attempted to relax the Leviathan of Soviet economics, and drew the conclusion that mathematics is not sufficient in itself to properly address the economy. Eventually, Polanyi developed an institutionalist approach in order to be able to address both the variability of market economies and the failures of socialist 'super-planners' who claimed to eliminate the drift of individual economic adjustments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Michael Polanyi's epistemology is fruitful for considering beauty's epistemological significance, this article shows that Polanyi's epistemology lacks explicit development of an important aspect of beauty's contribution to knowledge formation-- as mediator. The treatment unfolds by first assessing how Polanyi does treat beauty, and second by establishing the grounds for beauty to serve as a mediator, as well as its fittingness within a Polanyian epistemology. The article considers an expansion of Polanyi's epistemology to further and more clearly elucidate beauty as mediator of knowledge. Concluding remarks consider how beauty as mediator of knowledge opens the door to pursuit of questions regarding beauty's role in theological epistemology--i.e., in mediating knowledge of God specifically. [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]

In a new book, Jonathan Rauch argues for a spirited defense of the "Constitution of Knowledge." His comparison of the US Constitution to a national intellectual community resembles Michael Polanyi's metaphor of a "republic of science." But the surprising thing about Polanyi's evocation of a republic was precisely its embrace of science's irrationalities, not an assertion that republics and scientific communities were alike in the pursuit of truth. First amendment scholar Donald Alexander Downs's new book offers a vision of intellectual community that more effectively reconciles the irrational to the pursuit of truth, and as such perhaps a more workable framework for accommodating the extremes of our age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his experimental studies on tactile recognition, the German neurologist Kurt Goldstein observes a peculiar 'twitching movement' of the body in neurologically impaired patients suffering from mind-blindness. Drawing on Goldstein's interpretation of these bodily movements as kinaesthetic reactions, the present article advances a symmetrical conception of tactility that relocates the bipolarity of the sense of touch within the human body. In line with this symmetrical approach, the kinaesthetic reactions will be construed as tactile self-activation or self-touch of the body and conceptualized, following Michael Polanyi's epistemological notion, as the 'tacit dimension of touch'. Combining neuropathological aspects with a media theoretical and epistemological trajectory, this article aims at re-evaluating the centrality of the registers of the sense of touch as the fundamental ground for grasping the world in its concrete encounters as well as in its symbolic abstractions. [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]

Paradigmatic knowledge still remains a highly used notion deprived of a proper conceptual understanding. Our investigation highlights the fact that the very notion of paradigm is widely used, quasi-scientifically, in an indiscriminate manner. In the context in which numerous texts criticize this concept, “paradigm”, and some even outbid not only the confusing nature of the concept, but also the similarities with the concept of “tacit knowledge” proposed by Michael Polanyi. Our approach is to highlight the limits of the similarities, to nuance and emphasize the dissimilarities, i.e. the way in which paradigmatic knowledge cannot be understood as tacit knowledge, and, the fact that what we can identify as paradigmatic knowledge represents a foundation that supports a conceptualization of the evolutions from paradigmatic knowledge to the concept of communicable knowledge, the opposite of tacit knowledge. [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]

In his recent work, ‘Sport, Aesthetic Experience, and Art as the Ideal Embodied Metaphor’, Tim L. Elcombe explores links between sport and art from a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience. However, Elcombe's work does not highlight the role of the imagination in the interpretation of the aesthetic something Michael Polanyi claims to be the ‘cornerstone of aesthetic theory’. With the backdrop of an increased interest in the aesthetics, phenomenology, and epistemology of sport, this discussion essay seeks to defend the usefulness and value of definitional demarcation debates between sport and art, to use Polanyi’s distinctions among technical, scientific and artistic problems to support the claim that sport is not art, and to offer an account of how sport contributes in its own way to human flourishing and why it is no less valuable experientially than art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an object designer's view of the parallels and intersections of body perception in Early Modern times and nowadays, aimed to expand the role of the human body in contemporary design practice. It seeks to trace the origins of our today's relation to the body and the relation of the body to its material surroundings, focusing on the meaning of the body as a medium of sensual experience in the contemporary design discourse. Just like anatomy cannot fully describe the phenomenon of the human body, the role of the body in design cannot be fully expressed by means of ergonomics and anthropometry alone. The article questions why we tend to look at the body from the outer rather than inner perspective. When did the body become an object and our relation to the body and our experience of the body become detached from selfhood? When was the sense of wholeness lost? In 1543, Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) published seven books on human anatomy titled De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, known as Fab-rica. Despite some biologically erroneous beliefs, a visual narrative through allegorical images, and an obvious confusion of an anatomical and erotic gaze in depicting the female body, this book was a breakthrough in the history of anatomy. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the theme of the body and its parts became dominant in all fields from medical, religious, and literary texts to art. The previous focus on the entire body gave way to the individualised importance of separate parts of the body. Due to the rapid progress of anatomical knowledge, the dissection of the human body becomes a key motif of acquiring knowledge. The inside of the body represents the hidden truth and is also a fundamental place to connect with God. With the rise of the science of anatomy, unfamiliar knowledge turns into a spectacle, and the body becomes objectified. The dramatic experiences of Shakespeare's protagonists illustrate this conflict of excepting the revealed body and show that the pre-Cartesian perception of a human individual does not separate selfhood and its materiality, and body parts are associated with individual psychology. These examples can be related to the neurobiological term of intero-ception, which refers to the sense of the internal state of the body. In the context of design and well-being, pre-Cartesian self-perception and especially interoception could be used as a certain mindset to create and use objects in a more fulfilling, mindful way. The advent of anatomical wax models that were anonymous and normative made it clear that the constitution of all humans is more or less the same. This idea allowed the interior of the body to be mechanised and to move gradually from the self within the body to the perception of the Cartesian or, in other words, purely mechanical relationship between oneself and the standardised material body. The English philosopher, poet, scientist, and writer Margaret Lucas Cavendish (1623-1673), conversely, emphasized vitality, sensory cognition, and equal integrity of the physical body in human existence. She sought to question the mechanistic view by presenting an empirical view of the body and its relation to the environment. Cavendish belongs to organic materialism, according to which knowledge and senses are inseparable. She stated that the matter can think and, therefore, knowledge is embodied. This cognitive tactility and sensory pluralism of knowledge was opposite to Descartes' perception that the body is something other than human nature and that the dualism of mind and body gives the mind a higher position against the misleading material world. Cavendish's play The Convent of Pleasure (1668) containing a detailed description of material surroundings where the body can settle and enjoy the pleasures can be an inspiration for a more sensitive and refined designer's look. It sensually awakens our imagination and identifies a possible human sensitivity to the material environment. All of Cavendish's descriptions are based on sensations. Her play was a reaction to the belief that women are more bodily by nature, while the body was rejected as an obstacle to pure thought or an unreliable mediator between the mind and the material world. Both the belief of Shakespeare's protagonists that the truth lies within the body and Cavendish's cognitive sensuality are related to tacit knowledge, a term introduced by Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), which can be related to Gestalt psychology and phenomenology. Conscious inclusion of this pre-logical knowledge could be considered a necessary methodology in the process of meaningful, powerful design. According to Polanyi, the body is the main instrument of all external knowledge, both intellectual and practical. Nevertheless, the body is the only thing we usually do not experience as an object. This article examines how we neglect the body in design, both in the creation and use of objects. This historical context has inspired quite a few designers, usually from the aesthetic or technological viewpoint. There are several contemporary designers who are sensually interested in the human body or are looking for a special relation to the body (Olivier van Herpt, Hansol Kim, Giulia Sol-dati, and Aldo Bakker are among them). Even though bodily objects do exist, they are often designed for visual stimulation and association or are accidental projects that are not embedded in design practice. The historical perspective allows us to look at the human body from a new angle and to re-evaluate what is taken for granted. It helps to erase what is known and what is an accepted fact, to analyze the phenomena from a distance, and to use the learn to unlearn method in a creative way. This kind of mental experiment creatively opens a possibility of speculative interpretation or accepting ideas directly. Decontextualised historical ideas take on new meanings in the present. On the other hand, history can be viewed timelessly due to the unceasing relevance of ideas or works. Early modern examples draw attention to the established concept of the body and question the synthetically, rationally created and conceptual design when it has no embedded sensual experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recounts the efforts of a group of subsistence farmers (earning approximately $1.00 per day in income) in a mountainous rural part of Haiti who, working with a young social entrepreneur from their community, have self-organized to develop more economic opportunities by improving their farming practices communally. We posit that they have done so on the basis of the Haitian value of konbit , a form of social sharing and solidarity, and thus, on a foundation of what Michael Polanyi has termed tacit knowledge of their situational context. We suggest that efforts to secure development be rooted in initiatives aimed at catalyzing residents' self-mobilization capacities and tacit communal knowledge and values, even if, or when, such an approach requires more time or resources to obtain desired outcomes. We also highlight critical perspectives of the now ubiquitous concept of resilience to explore the possibilities and limitations of agency that emerge from tacit knowledge in the context of continuing neoliberalism and its accompanying structural violence. We conclude that Polanyi's ideas of freedom and agency provide a much more robust foundation on which to build a conceptualization of development and political–economic change than is offered by today's prevailing neoliberal 'resilience' imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]