Science, Faith and Society

Science, Faith and Society PDF Author: Michael Polanyi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022616344X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
In its concern with science as an essentially human enterprise, Science, Faith and Society makes an original and challenging contribution to the philosophy of science. On its appearance in 1946 the book quickly became the focus of controversy. Polanyi aims to show that science must be understood as a community of inquirers held together by a common faith; science, he argues, is not the use of "scientific method" but rather consists in a discipline imposed by scientists on themselves in the interests of discovering an objective, impersonal truth. That such truth exists and can be found is part of the scientists' faith. Polanyi maintains that both authoritarianism and scepticism, attacking this faith, are attacking science itself.

Science, Faith and Society

Science, Faith and Society PDF Author: Michael Polanyi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022616344X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
In its concern with science as an essentially human enterprise, Science, Faith and Society makes an original and challenging contribution to the philosophy of science. On its appearance in 1946 the book quickly became the focus of controversy. Polanyi aims to show that science must be understood as a community of inquirers held together by a common faith; science, he argues, is not the use of "scientific method" but rather consists in a discipline imposed by scientists on themselves in the interests of discovering an objective, impersonal truth. That such truth exists and can be found is part of the scientists' faith. Polanyi maintains that both authoritarianism and scepticism, attacking this faith, are attacking science itself.

Personal Knowledge

Personal Knowledge PDF Author: Michael Polanyi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Michael Polanyi and His Generation

Michael Polanyi and His Generation PDF Author: Mary Jo Nye
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226610659
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
In Michael Polanyi and His Generation, Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare. At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi’s scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation—including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton—and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science.

The Tacit Dimension

The Tacit Dimension PDF Author: Michael Polanyi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226672980
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
"The Tacit Dimension" argues that tacit knowledge -tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments- is a crucial part of scientific knowledge. This volume challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.

Meaning

Meaning PDF Author: Michael Polanyi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226672956
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Published very shortly before his death in February 1976, Meaning is the culmination of Michael Polanyi's philosophic endeavors. With the assistance of Harry Prosch, Polanyi goes beyond his earlier critique of scientific "objectivity" to investigate meaning as founded upon the imaginative and creative faculties. Establishing that science is an inherently normative form of knowledge and that society gives meaning to science instead of being given the "truth" by science, Polanyi contends here that the foundation of meaning is the creative imagination. Largely through metaphorical expression in poetry, art, myth, and religion, the imagination is used to synthesize the otherwise chaotic and disparate elements of life. To Polanyi these integrations stand with those of science as equally valid modes of knowledge. He hopes this view of the foundation of meaning will restore validity to the traditional ideas that were undercut by modern science. Polanyi also outlines the general conditions of a free society that encourage varied approaches to truth, and includes an illuminating discussion of how to restore, to modern minds, the possibility for the acceptance of religion.

Personal Knowledge

Personal Knowledge PDF Author: Michael Polanyi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134746091
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
First published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Michael Polanyi

Michael Polanyi PDF Author: Mark T. Mitchell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1684516811
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
The polymath Michael Polanyi first made his mark as a physical chemist, but his interests gradually shifted to economics, politics, and philosophy, in which field he would ultimately propose a revolutionary theory of knowledge that grew out of his firsthand experience with both the scientific method and political totalitarianism. In this sixth entry in ISI Books’ Library of Modern Thinkers’ series, Mark T. Mitchell reveals how Polanyi came to recognize that the roots of the modern political and spiritual crisis lay in an errant conception of knowledge that served to foreclose any possibility of making meaningful statements about truth, goodness, or beauty. Polanyi’s theory of knowledge as ineluctably personal but also grounded in reality is not merely of historical interest, writes Mitchell, for it proposes an attractive alternative for anyone who would reject both the hubris of modern rationalism and the ultimately nihilistic implications of academic postmodernism.

Michael Polanyi's Philosophy of Science

Michael Polanyi's Philosophy of Science PDF Author: Tchafu Mwamba
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780889463257
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description


Society, Economics, and Philosophy

Society, Economics, and Philosophy PDF Author: Michael Polanyi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351489097
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Society, Economics and Philosophy represents the full range of Polanyi's interests outside of his scientific work: economics, politics, society, philosophy of science, religion and positivist obstacles to it, and art. Polanyi's principal ideas are contained in three essays: on the scientific revolution, the creative imagination and the mind-body relation. Precisely because of Polanyi's work in the physical sciences, his writings have a unique dimension not found in other advocates of the market and too infrequently found even in philosophers of science.Polanyi was a powerful critic of totalitarianism and of the deficiencies of the usual defenses of freedom which helped to prepare the way for it. Freedom, he argued, can be based only upon truth and dedication to transcendent ideals, not upon skepticism, utilitarianism and the liberty of doing merely as one pleases. At a time when easy slogans about socialism were dominant in intellectual circles, epitomized by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and when calls for the central planning of scientific research were made by such as J.D. Bernal, Polanyi exposed their errors and showed that science can flourish only in a free society.More radically than even von Mises and Hayek, Polanyi showed that an industrial economy can operate only polycentrically, that central planning is logically impossible, and that what was called by that name in the Soviet Union was in reality no such thing. Likewise, scientific research can proceed, not by a central plan, but only by the spontaneous self-adjustment of separate initiatives to discover a common reality. Against the positivism dominant within philosophy of science, he argued that the notion of reality must be restored and made central. Yet physical sciences, he also argued, are only one branch of science, and the sciences of life and mind are logically richer and more complex and cannot be reduced to the former, nor mind to body or to computers, nor art to its ph

The Way of Discovery

The Way of Discovery PDF Author: Richard Gelwick
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725210797
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
This book offers the first full exploration of the religious, ethical, and social dimensions of Michael Polanyi's philosophy, and its implications for the crisis of modern culture. Michael Polanyi developed a new way of understanding the process of discovering scientific knowledge - a theory which can alter our notions of ourselves and of existence. In 'The Way of Discovery', Richard Gelwick, a former student of the renowned scientist-turned-philosopher, presents us with a comprehensive and documented introduction to Polanyi's theory of knowledge. Michael Polanyi was born in Budapest in 1891. After a distinguished career as a physical chemist, he turned to philosophy, religion, and social sciences, becoming, by the time of his death in 1976, one of the greatest scientist-philosophers of our century. Polanyi maintained that three centuries of belief in scientific detachment had produced a crisis of culture. Working from his own experience as a scientist, and with an insight from Gestalt psychology, Polanyi asserted that objective scientific knowledge is at bottom personal knowledge - that scientists and artists establish meaning in basically the same way. His ideas call for a new way of thinking and pose a new frontier of thought, a new image of humanity