The Projects of Michael Polanyi and Charles Taylor

Abstract

Now that Taylor has introduced us to the revolutionary ideas blossoming in the 1960s, John Apczynski writes about the reception of Michael Polanyi and Charles Taylor on the intellectual scene. Apczynski conveys the excitement that their ideas generated. He looks back but he also looks forward. He discusses how Polanyi’s epistemology brought new possibilities for the study of religion as well as social and political theory, and how these coordinate with Taylor’s projects of recasting our historical understanding of secularity and revitalizing classical liberal theory in the less atomistic form of civic republicanism.

This essay contends that Polanyi’s groundbreaking effort to formulate a more adequate understanding of scientific knowing by acknowledging its practice of operating on the basis of shared assumptions bears striking parallels to Taylor’s subsequent efforts to disclose the cultural assumptions sustaining our sense of identity. Both projects had to uncover normally ignored cultural values and practices sustaining scientific knowing and our identities as moral beings. Given this connection, students of Polanyi would be well served to explore Taylor’s works in order to develop further implications of Polanyi’s thought. Given Taylor’s later exploration of belief in a secular era motivated by his Catholic faith, he additionally offers examples for developing the theological implications of Polanyi’s thought.