Personal Knowledge of Everything

William Taussig Scott; Martin X. Moleski, S.J. Michael Polanyi: Scientist and Philosopher. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xx + 364 pp. $45.

Reviewed by Rena Selya

This comprehensive biography provides a useful overview of the work of Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), one of the 20th century’s most prominent scientists and philosophers. Based on interviews with Polanyi’s family, friends, and colleagues, as well as meticulous readings of his chemical, economic, and philosophical writings, the book reconstructs his intellectual development in parallel to events in his personal life. One of the authors, William Scott, knew Polanyi well, and his admiration for him as a person and as a scholar is evident in this sympathetic portrait.

Although he was born into a prosperous Jewish Hungarian family, Polanyi was baptized at an early age and identified himself as a Christian throughout his life. His religious sensibilities played an important role in the emergence of his philosophical ideas. After briefly studying medicine at the University of Budapest, Polanyi pursued a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in Karlsruhe, Germany. Polanyi’s research on thermodynamics, the adsorption of gases, and reaction kinetics put him in direct contact with Albert Einstein and Walter Nernst, and he sustained a lively correspondence with them for several years. He was offered a position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry under the direction of Fritz Haber, where he remained until 1933.

 Scott and Moleski argue that Polanyi was a talented chemist but that he was sometimes unable to grasp the full implications of his results. They trace this failure to his enthusiasm for entering fields in which he had no formal training, which meant “he lacked [the] maturity of judgment that comes only with long exposure to the field” (p. 68). Nevertheless, Polanyi was so respected in the chemical community that when Hitler’s rise to power made it necessary for him to leave Berlin, he had no trouble securing a position at the University of Manchester.

Soon after Polanyi, his wife Magda, and their sons, George and John, settled in England, Polanyi became interested in social and economic philosophy. He continued to direct research and lecture on chemistry until 1948, but his primary areas of study and publication became economics and philosophy. He also entered into vigorous public debates with other scientists over the relationship between science and free societies. Never content to isolate himself in an academic ivory tower, Polanyi produced films on economics and published widely on science and belief, trying to reach as broad an audience as possible.

Polanyi was committed to building up his philosophical ideas “in the spirit of scientific inquiry,” and he soon turned his full attention to the philosophy of science and epistemology. In 1948 Polanyi officially left chemistry and transferred to a chair in the Faculty of Economics and Social Studies at Manchester. As the authors point out, philosophers at Manchester and other English universities were resistant to Polanyi’s approach and ideas because he came to philosophy without formal training in the field. Despite this obstacle, he gradually built a reputation as a creative and thought-provoking scholar. His ideas about the roles of belief and tacit knowledge in science, described in his 1958 master work, Personal Knowledge, were particularly welcomed by the American philosophy community.

Polanyi spent the 1950s and 1960s flying all over the world, giving lectures and collaborating with philosophers in an attempt to create a complete philosophy of all types of knowledge, not just science. Because Polanyi was such a prolific writer and lecturer, the treatment of his ideas in this book feels at times superficial, especially when compared with the wealth of details given about his travels and family interactions. The authors provide good context for Polanyi’s early scientific career, but more information about the state of philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s would have fleshed out the account of his later work. Nevertheless, this book is a tantalizing introduction to a fascinating figure and should inspire readers interested in the philosophy of science to seek out Polanyi’s works.