The Way of Discovery: An Introduction to the Thought of Michael Polanyi

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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