Recent evolutionary interpretations of religion can be illuminating. However, by failing to take into account what Polanyi calls the “logic of achievement” they end up attributing to impersonal segments of DNA the personal striving that underlies religious existence.

This paper presents Michael Polanyi’s escape from Berlin to Manchester as part of a major wave of intellectual migration at the time of Hitler’s rise in Germany in 1933. Many émigré scientists and social scientists from Hungary experienced forced and unexpected relocation twice in the interwar era: first in 1919-20, after the fall of the Bolshevik-type Hungarian Republic of Councils, and again after the Nazi takeover. Once in exile, they formed an unusually tight support group assisting each other by cohorting, networking, and bonding. Their group included a host of major refugee scientists, scholars, visual artists, musicians, men of letters, and public figures. The rich Hungarian contribution to German and, later, U.S. culture and civilization was, to a very great extent, the result of anti-Semitic policies and practices in Hungary after 1920 and in Germany after 1933.

This paper examines the work of Michael Oakeshott in relation to that of Polanyi. While there are important similarities that Oakeshott himself recognized, their fundamentally different conceptions of reality—Polanyi ‘s realism and Oakeshott’s idealism—ultimately serve to highlight important distinctions between these two thinkers.

Whereas Richard Gelwick has charged Lesslie Newbigin with failing to distinguish between scientific and religious knowing, Newbigin was concerned to resist a false dichotomy between the two. Ultimate commitment to such a dichotomy must allow itself to be questioned in any authentic dialogue with religion as ultimate commitment.

This article discusses three different approaches to human knowledge. The first is that of Peter Simons, a linguistic philosopher, who suggests that language has an underlying algebraic structure. The second approach is that of Ernest Nagel, a philosopher of science, who maintains that the key to knowledge lies in logical analysis. The third approach, due to Michael Polanyi, stresses the idea of tacit integration of parts into composite wholes. All three employ hierarchical schemes, the first two work from the top down, whereas Polanyi works from the bottom up, using the idea of ‘emergence’ .