Michael Polanyi

Brief Biography of Michael Polanyi

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), was born and raised in Budapest; he trained and served as a physician during World War I. But Polanyi fled from Hungary in the turmoil just after the war and soon became an internationally recognized chemistry researcher at Germany’s famous Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. When the Nazis came to power, Polanyi again migrated, taking a position, in 1933, as a professor responsible for a research laboratory at the University of Manchester. Although he continued to produce outstanding research in chemistry in England until about 1950, Polanyi turned more and more to scholarly writing focused on science and politics, economics and, eventually, philosophy. Michael Polanyi was the brother of economist Karl Polanyi. Michael and Magda Polanyi had two children, one of whom, John Polanyi, later was a 1983 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry.

The “post-critical” philosophy Polanyi developed was motivated by the horrors of the twentieth century with two World Wars and the rise of totalitarianism, as well as the popularity of the misleading accounts of science found in both positivist and Marxist philosophy. Polanyi developed an innovative account of human knowing. In order to overcome the inherited dichotomy of subjective v. objective knowledge that separates facts from values, he proposed that all knowledge is personal, i.e., grounded in tacit commitments from which we seek to discover a reality that always promises to reveal itself in new ways. Polanyi develops his philosophical ideas over forty years in many articles and books. His magnum opus is Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958) which is a book based on his 1951 and 1952 Gifford Lectures.

Polanyi’s works spanned many disciplines and have been found fruitful by those working in economics, politics, theology, philosophy, the natural and social sciences, computer science, and other areas. For additional biographical and historical resources (including information on the 2005 Oxford University Press biography of Michael Polanyi) see III in Basic Resources on Michael Polanyi.