Science, faith and society

In its concern as an essentially human enterprise, Science, Faith and Society makes an original and challenging contribution to the philosophy of science. On its appearance in 1946 the book became the focus of controversy. Polanyi aims to show that science must be understood as a community of inquirers held together by a common faith; science, he argues, is not the use of "scientific method" but rather consists in a discipline imposed by scientists on themselves in the interests of discovering an objective, impersonal truth. That such truth exists and can be found is part of the scientists' faith. Polanyi maintains that both authoritarianism and scepticism, attacking this faith, are attacking science itself--from back cover.

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huetiusJan 2022

Sure.

Polanyi is easy. He wrote a trio of short, accessible, and engaging books outlining his ideas: Science, Faith, and Society (1946), Personal Knowledge (1958), and The Tacit Dimension (1966). He was a true polymath, and very up-to-date with psychological science of his day; I would be interested in your thoughts as a specialist.

Rosmini is hard. He was a very bad writer, and wrote very long books, all of them referring to each other, which caused him a lot of difficulties[0]. His magnum opus is Theosophy, and all of his works will eventually lead there. My first book of his was Principles of Ethics, which convinced me of the value of his work, and I’m still trying to untangle the others. If I had to summarize his idea of intuition, it would be “analogical participation of the subject in the objective order of being.” Also crucial is that this capacity is innate.

[0] You can read his biography, he was extremely controversial in his time. His work was (exhaustively) consistent with the ancient and medieval philosophy of the Church, but was absolutely devastating for a certain kind of neo-scholasticism which was the dominant mode of exposition in the Church at the time. This led those theologians to accuse him of liberalism, modernism, secularism, Deism, freemasonry, etc., and all of those groups were happy to claim that the most ambitious corpus of philosophy and theology that the Church had produced in the modern era was an endorsement of their views. Since his work is so difficult, it took a very long time for anyone to recognize that neither of these interpretations were true.

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kldavis4Nov 2021

"Personal Knowledge" and "Science, Faith and Society" are two that I've enjoyed

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huetiusDec 2021

Let me clarify:

I like Polanyi, but positivism is still very much alive. I mentioned in my post various failed attempts to surpass it, in which I would include Pragmatism, continuations of Marxism, the critical school (excluding some late works by Horkheimer), and postmodernism, all of which retain positivism’s negations.

EDIT: to supply some evidence, in Book III of Science, Faith, and Society, Polanyi argues that unchecked Positivism would result in a society not fundamentally dissimilar from the Soviet society which had prompted him to write the book in the first place. I encourage you to read it and compare it against your experience, asking whether Polanyi secured victory, or whether crucial aspects of his thought went unheeded.

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