Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

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 pre-Copernican 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.

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.