Michael Polanyi 1891 – 1976

Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-British polymath, physical chemist, economist, and philosopher and the younger brother of the economic historian Karl Polanyi. After a distinguished career as a chemist in Berlin, he fled Nazi Germany and turned increasingly to philosophy, holding chairs of social studies at Manchester and Oxford. His Personal Knowledge and The Tacit Dimension argue that all knowing involves a tacit, personal component that cannot be fully articulated, and that the ideal of strict objectivity is therefore incoherent. His thought has shaped philosophy of science, theology, and the study of expertise.

Michael Polanyi was born in 1891 in Budapest, the younger brother of the economic historian Karl Polanyi, into a Jewish Hungarian family of liberal-bourgeois sympathies. He took medical and chemical degrees at Budapest, served as a medical officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, and from 1920 worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin, where his research on X-ray diffraction, reaction kinetics, and adsorption made his scientific reputation.

Forced from Berlin in 1933, he was appointed to the chair of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester, and from 1948 to a personal chair in social studies created for him at the same university. His major philosophical works are Science, Faith and Society (1946), the Gifford Lectures Personal Knowledge (1958), The Tacit Dimension (1966), Knowing and Being, and the co-authored Meaning. He was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

Polanyi argued that all knowing involves an irreducible personal commitment of the knower, that 'we know more than we can tell', and that scientific inquiry is sustained by an apprenticeship into a tradition that cannot be reduced to explicit rules. His critique of objectivism and his account of tacit knowing have influenced philosophy of science, theology, the study of expertise, and management theory. He died at Northampton in February 1976.