Full appreciation of Bill Poteat’s work requires an understanding of Michael Polanyi. This essay briefly recounts Polanyi’s biography, then describes central features of his thought, especially the centrality of discovery, commitment, and tacit knowing. It then reports on Poteat’s own summary of Polanyi’s thought in his major work, Polanyian Meditations.

This essay provides a timeline charting contact between Michael Polanyi and William H. Poteat. We trace the contours of the intimate, multifaceted, and mutually influential friendship of Polanyi and Poteat which developed over more than twenty years.

William Poteat acknowledges a profound debt to Michael Polanyi, yet claimed not to be doing Polanyian scholarship. So what was the relationship of the former to the latter? Polanyian motifs important to Poteat include the fiduciary, creativity of knowledge, personal agency, critique of reductionism, and the confessional mode. In addition, Poteat goes beyond Polanyi in his rich humanistic background, his sense of the tragic, the need for a new language and method for philosophy commensurate with the dialectical nature of truth, the concept of “mindbody,” the centrality of speech/orality to human being.

Thomas Pfau’s Minding the Modern simultaneously (1) elucidates the correspondence between various philosophical issues, (2) identifies how these issues were disaggregated during the modern period and how this led to the collapse of humanistic studies, and (3) outlines a strategy for reintegrating these issues and thereby restoring confidence in forms of philosophical, historical, and moral reasoning. Pfau engages many of the problems Michael Polanyi sought to address, but approaches them from a rather different perspective.