Notes

  1. . These views are argued in several publications but are perhaps most succinctly put in Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
  2. . Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1966), p. 3. For a broader discussion of the course of Polanyi's career in relation to his philosophical ideas see Richard Gelwick, The Way of Discovery:. An Introduction to the Thought of Michael Polanyi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). For a partial account of Polanyi himself see Polanyi's 1963 introduction to his 1946 volume Science, Faith and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 7–19.
  3. . Although Polanyi never in short compass clearly defines “post‐critical,” he apparently understood his own work as a response to what he took as the limitations of both Kantian philosophy and the broader Cartesian tradition in which it stands. In an address delivered shortly after the publication of his magnum opus Personal Knowledge, whose subtitle is Towards a Post‐Critical Philosophy, he made the following comment on the subtitle: “1 have given to the book called Personal Knowledge… the subtitle ‘Towards a Post‐Critical Philosophy.’ This was meant to say that in my view the great intellectual revolution which is marked by the names of Descartes, Hume, J. S. Mill, and Bertrand Russell, is nearing its final limits. This movement was guided by the principle that doubt is the solvent of error which leaves behind truth.”“The Outlook of Science: Its Sickness and Cure” (Paper delivered in Austin, Tex., November 1958), p. 10.
  4. . Many of Polanyi's essays and books discuss the tacit/explicit distinction and a similar distinction between “subsidiary” and “focal” awareness. One of the briefest and clearest discussions is in Tacit Dimension, pp. 4–20
  5. . Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post–Critical Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).
  6. . Gelwick, p.xii.
  7. . Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).
  8. . This was Polanyi's own evaluation of the evolution of his ideas. See Tacit Dimension, p. x.
  9. . Harry Prosch discusses both the origin of the material in Meaning and his role as a collaborator in his “Preface” to Meaning, pp. ix–xi, and in his essay included in this Zygon issue.
  10. . Harry Prosch, review of Richard Gelwick, The Way of Discovery in Ethics 89 (January 1979): 211–16.