ABSTRACT
In this book we will present the philosophy of Michael Polanyi as we understand it in order to show that his ideas remain important and cannot be reduced to a simple contrast of tacit and explicit knowledge. A fuller understanding of his ideas will throw new light on the entire area of the relationship between skill and knowledge. Although it will not make much sense to most readers at this stage, our conclusion is that the first stage in making Polanyi’s ideas more generally useful will consist in mapping the tacit component of all exercises of skill and knowledge. We will not take up the questions of the parallels and convergences of Polanyi with other contemporary or later philosophers. Commentators on Polanyi have suggested common ground with Piaget, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Dewey and Bentley, and Peirce.1 Polanyi uses some of the work of Piaget appreciatively, but was probably unaware of the more technically philosophical part of his work, while he was very negative about Wittgenstein, but may have failed to grasp the underlying intentions of his later works. Polanyi (1964b) made a claim that his concept of indwelling was equivalent to Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, but he never returned to this topic.
