Personal Knowledge ─ Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy

In Personal Knowledge, the distinguished physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi demonstrates that the scientist's personal participation in his knowledge, in both its discovery and its validation, is an indispensable part of science itself. Even in the exact sciences, "knowing" is an art, of which the skill of the knower, guided by his personal commitment and his passionate sense of increasing contact with reality, is a logically necessary part.

The tendency to make knowledge impersonal in our culture has split fact from value, science from humanity. Polanyi wishes to substitute for the objective, impersonal ideal of scientific detachment an alternative ideal which gives attention to the personal involvement of the knower in all acts of understanding. His book restores science to its rightful place in an integrated culture, as part of the whole person's continuing endeavor to make sense of the totality of his experience.

Polanyi expert Mary Jo Nye contributes an insightful new foreword to this expanded edition of Polanyi’s landmark text. She offers an overview of Polanyi’s life and career, discusses the controversial reception of the book and the subsequent intellectual debates it spawned, summarizes the work section by section and offers a list of key terms from the text, and finally makes the compelling case that Polanyi’s view of knowledge creation is just as relevant to intellectual endeavors today as it was when it was first published in 1958.

Michael Polanyi (18911976) was a Hungarian-British chemist and philosopher, a fellow of the Royal Society, and a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. His many books includeScience, Faith, and Society; Knowing and Being; and Meaning, all published by the University of Chicago Press.