Heartfelt Thanks to Phil Mullins!
It is a pleasure to join with colleagues in celebration and appreciation of the extraordinary contributions of Phil Mullins to Polanyi scholarship, the Polanyi Society, and the journal Tradition and Discovery. I first published an article about Michael Polanyi in 1996, long before my book Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science first appeared in 2011. Phil and I began corresponding regularly around 2003, or perhaps earlier, when he asked for an update of my publications so that he could include them in a list of recent Polanyi scholarship in Tradition and Discovery. As General Editor of Tradition and Discovery, Phil made sure that my book was reviewed in the journal and published a plenary lecture that he and Marty Moleski invited me to give at the June 2012 Loyola University at Chicago conference, where I was delighted to meet members of the Society. Our correspondence has included discussion of many themes of mutual interest, such as Polanyi’s concepts of public liberty and dynamic order and connections between Polanyi and Hayek or Popper or Mannheim. For many years now, Phil has updated me on activities, publications, and conferences as they occurred.
I know that I am not alone among Phil’s correspondents. As I have reflected on Phil’s role in furthering and contributing to the wide universe of Polanyi scholarship and discussions over the last thirty years and more, I have thought of Phil as the coordinating center. His own research is one of his significant contributions. Further, however, as the journal’s editor from 1991 to 2012 and as a board member since 2001 and then president of the Society, he reminds me of the legendary Marin Mersenne. Père Mersenne (1588–1648) was a Minim friar in Paris, a theologian, and a philosopher. He is famous in the history of science for creating in the first half of the seventeenth century an extensive network of colleagues and correspondents who were contributing to the new experimental and mechanical philosophy. Mersenne made sure that natural philosophers in France, Italy, England, and the Dutch Republic knew what each other were doing, and he set up a Parisian academy that was a forerunner of the Paris Academy of Sciences. Similarly, Phil has helped create a network of scholars and scholarship that owes much to his unwavering correspondence from his base in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at MWSU. I personally am grateful to him for including me in this framework, and it is a pleasure to salute and thank him in this brief encomium.
MaryJo Nye
Professor Emerita of History
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331 USA
Email: mary.nye@oregonstate.edu
https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/users/mary-jo-nye