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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]

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]

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]

In this interview, Phil Mullins questions Sheldon Richmond about the main ideas developed in his 2020 book A Way Through the Global Techno-Scientific Culture. [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]

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 response to the events of January 6 and the second impeachment trial, which made clear the fragility of democracy in the USA, several scholars whose work has appeared in this journal comment on one or more of the following questions: (1) What causes, epistemic and/or social, might Polanyi see as contributing to the incivility, rancor, and division that now characterize American politics? (2) What would Polanyi say about the events of January 6, as well as the events leading up to it? (3) What remedies might Polanyi suggest for rehabilitating our experiment in democracy? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Gábor István Bíró, who completed his Ph. D. in the Philosophy and History of Science Department (HPS doctoral program) at Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE), which been affiliated with the Michael Polanyi Liberal Philosophical Association (MPLPA), is presented. He mentions his dissertation with a provocative title, "Projecting the Light of Democracy: Michael Polanyi's Efforts to Save Liberalism via an Economics Film, 1933-1948".

Using the writing of Eliseo Fernandez and Jesper Hoffmeyer, this essay introduces important ideas in the emerging interdisciplinary field known as "biosemiotics." Later discussion summarizes Michael Polanyi's criticisms of the Modern Synthesis and his alternative constructive philosophical account of life, evolution and biological study, suggesting areas of overlap with contemporary biosemiotics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi corresponded with each other for the best part of thirty years. They had shared interests that included science, social science, economics, epistemology, history of ideas and political philosophy. Studying their correspondence and related writings, this article shows that Hayek and Polanyi were committed Liberals but with different understandings of liberty, the forces that endanger liberty, and the policies required to rescue it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides a timeline charting contact between Michael Polanyi and William H. Poteat. We trace the contours of the intimate, multifaceted, and mutually influential friendship of Polanyi and Poteat which developed over more than twenty years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this brief essay, I discuss some interesting elements of Michael Polanyi's provocative 1936 lecture outlining the potential of diagramatic film to transform social thinking about the economic order. A few years later, Polanyi more carefully and convincingly returns to some themes identified here, as he articulates his criticisms of and reconstruction of liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay celebrates the life and achievements of Richard Gelwick, the man perhaps most responsible for not only recognizing the importance of the thought of Michael Polanyi, but also for communicating its significance and giving it institutional continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a brief response to Richard Moodey's analysis of views of tradition found in the thought of Edward Shils and Michael Polanyi. I have just been asked by the publisher to give him 200 words for the dust-jacket. Usually he does that himself, but he finds it too difficult in this case. Unfortunately, I find it very difficult myself, too, for I do not know how to approach the public best in such brief terms on such a large matter. On the other hand, I am sure you could write down the most suitable 200 words in little over 200 seconds. Might I ask you to do this? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a brief response to Richard Moodey's analysis of views of tradition found in the thought of Edward Shils and Michael Polanyi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief essay introduces David Agler, Vincent Colapietro, and Robert Innis, who provide the major essays in this special issue of Tradition and Discovery devoted to putting together Michael Polanyi and Charles Sanders Peirce. It also provides an historiographical comment, suggesting that the two references to Peirce in Polanyi's writing are quite puzzling and likely imply that Polanyi's collaborators, rather than Polanyi, took an interest in similarities between the thought of Peirce and Polanyi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay discusses Murray Jardine's argument in Speech and Political Practice, Recovering the Place of Human Responsibility, showing how the author skillfully draws on the thought of Michael Polanyi, William Poteat and Alaisdair MacIntyre, Jardine offers a sharp critique of contemporary culture and politics as well as political theory. He develops the idea of place, drawing attention to the acritical reliance upon context in human speech acts, this motif he argues can be a component of the new political vocabulary necessary to initiate public conversations about the common good. There are interesting questions about how Jardine account "fits" with some of the themes in Michael Polanyi's political philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay pulls together from myriad sources the record of Marjorie Grene's early collaboration with Michael Polanyi as well as her interesting, changing commentary on Polanyi's philosophical perspective and particularly that articulated in Personal Knowledge. It provides an account of the conflicting perspectives of Grene and Harry Prosch, who collaborated in publishing Polanyi's last work, Meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This memorial essay surveys the achievements of Marjorie Grene as a historian of philosophy and a philosopher of biology. It analyzes the way in which Grene's account of persons and knowledge developes in relation to her work in succession on the thought of Michael Polanyi, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the ecological psychology of James J. and Eleanor Gibson. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay suggests that what Michael Polanyi termed his theory of tacit knowing in his late writing can also be fairly described as an account of agency in living forms. Such an account could be useful to modern biologists, although it seems unlikely that biologists will come to appreciate Polanyi's notions about agency since they do not understand the nature of biological inquiry as Polanyi does. Polanyi weaves inextricably together his understanding of the agency of living forms and his understanding of biological inquiry. Following my discussion of Polanyi's account of agency are brief comments comparing the ideas of Michael Polanyi and John Macmurray, a contemporary of Polanyi whose mature philosophical ideas focus on agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses Polanyi's ideas about the "comprehensive entity." It shows how Polanyi's philosophical perspective emphasizes comprehension. It outlines Polanyi's careful approach to ontological questions and shows how Marjorie Grene and to some degree Polanyi linked the theory of tacit knowing to ideas in Continental philosophy about being-in-the-world. It suggests that Polanyi's post-critical philosophical realism, like Peirce's realism, is more akin to medieval realism than contemporary discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]