Knowing and Being: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Michael Polanyi

Michael Polanyi is one of the most inspiring and original thinkers in the 20th century. He launched a new and independent philosophical tradition and fertilized many intellectual areas from cognitive psychology to management sciences. Polanyi's systematic thoughts span over many areas of philosophy, yet his most fruitful ideas, the fundamentals of his system are contributions to epistemology and ontology. His theory of tacit knowledge, his critique of both the objectivist and the subjectivist views of knowledge, his concept of emergence, and his theory of spontaneous order and coordination just to mention a few are probably the most important and most well-known. Polanyi also gave us a new picture about science in which scientist's personal participation guided by his cognitive and moral commitment, passions and trust, is an essential part of knowledge itself, in both its discovery and its validation. This volume focuses on these epistemological and ontological issues. Thirteen critical essays analyze, interpret and develop further Polanyi's ideas in the two parts of the book: Knowing and Being. Most of these papers address Polanyian themes in a comparative way, in dialogue with other major traditions illuminating both sides and helping to re-evaluate Polanyi in broader philosophical context. The title of this book also refers to a seminal collection of papers of Michael Polanyi (edited by Marjori Grene in 1969), Knowing and Being.