Seminars

Tuesday 26 March 2024

Conference on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Polanyi

Bruno Lemaitre, Global Health Institute, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Lemaitre

Wrote a book on Michael Polanyi

Books by Polanyi

  • Personal Knowledge
  • The Tacit Dimension
  • Science, Faith and Society

Tacit: unspecifiable and implicit aspects of knowledge, accepted incritically e.g. riding a bike, playing the piano, but also reading, writing, speaking a language

  • Michael Polanyi, the scientist who wanted to re-enchant the world

Michael Polanyi

Theory of personal knowledge Polanyi anti-reductionism

Standard model of Science : objectivism

Moral inversion: immoral actions are justified by the moral good they serve (e.g. Nazism, Stalinism)

Maybe to connect with Carlo Rovelli's work on the nature of time and the nature of knowledge

In 1993, in collaboration with Alain Connes, Rovelli proposed a solution to this problem called the thermal time hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, time emerges only in a thermodynamic or statistical context. If this is correct, the flow of time is not fundamental, deriving from the incompleteness of knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rovelli

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions after listening Polanyi's lectures

Personal knowledge is NOT subjectivism

  • realism: there is an external reality outside of us
  • submission to shared standards (responsability) e.g apply the scientific method
  • intersubjectivity:
  • universal intent:

Polanyi's anti-reductionism

Notion of emergence

Concept of dual control.

Polanyi's is post-critical philosophy.