Andrew Grosso

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that Michael Polanyi’s account of “moral inversion” provides a useful heuristic for elucidating various other themes in his philosophical writings. The essay first provides a summary of Polanyi’s description of the nature and emergence of moral inversion, chiefly as found in his essay, Beyond Nihilism. The essay then examines the work of three scholars who have offered various critiques and elaborations of Polanyi’s account of inversion. Finally, the essay advances several arguments aimed at clarifying the spiritual and religious nature of the challenge presented by inversion, and suggests the practice of the Eucharist provides helpful insights for addressing and overcoming the challenge of inversion.

Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor have produced a thorough, careful, and concise account of cognition and articulation that simultaneously provides ample justification for renewed confidence in our capacity to understand reality, engages many of the central concerns of both analytic and phenomenological philosophy, and helps reconnect the philosophical enterprise to wider social and cultural concerns.The book opens with an exposition of the "mediational" worldview that "influences all our theorizing" about thought and language, a worldview that suggests "we grasp external reality through internal representations". The "four interwoven strands" of this worldview include an account of perception and...

The primary purpose of this study is to examine the value of personhood as a means of engaging questions of divine and human existence, knowledge, and action within a unified conceptual horizon. The intent is to demonstrate that the notion of "personal being" is ideally suited to serve as a guiding heuristic for thinking about God, humanity, the world, and the relations between them. The project is necessarily limited to, first, the explication of an appropriate methodology and, second, the application of this method to fundamental theological questions. The former involves an examination of the post-critical philosophy of Michael Polanyi and an assessment of its usefulness as a foundation for personalistic theological inquiry. The latter involves the deployment of insights gained from the analysis of Polanyi's thought in an examination of trinitarian theology, Christology, and pneumatology. ;The dissertation begins with a review of the details of Polanyi's theory of knowledge . This opens the way for a consideration of the wider philosophical ramifications engendered by Polanyi's thought, which in turn makes possible the development of a Polanyian understanding of personal being . The reception of Polanyi's work within contemporary theological studies is then reviewed and the contributions of those who have made significant use of his thought are noted . Following these more descriptive efforts, the study then shifts to a more constructive attempt at elucidating a theological vision grounded in a Polanyian understanding of personal being. This first involves an examination of several of the more methodological issues involved in theological inquiry, including questions of truth, language, and the relationship between theology and philosophy . Drawing on the consequences of previous chapters , the study then moves to an examination of the elaboration of the personalistic, Polanyian perspective engendered therein relative to the doctrine of both the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity. A brief conclusion outlines several avenues for further study, and three appendices provide supplemental information about Polanyi's life and philosophical work

Recent studies dedicated to exploring the relationship between cognition and the body have both yielded a rich variety of intriguing possibilities and introduced new questions and problems. Michael Polanyi’s personalistic philosophy, enriched by insights from these studies, provides us with a means of addressing these challenges. In particular, Polanyi’s account of the relationship between embodiment and personhood offers an expansive and integrative approach to the issues at the heart of this line of inquiry and thus provides a way of advancing these studies and bringing their insights to bear on other areas of analysis and reflection.