Notes on Polanyi’s Interest in Heidegger

Abstract

This essay makes use of a variety of archival materials in the Michael Polanyi Papers to show that Polanyi’s comment linking his account of “indwelling” and Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world” (in his 1964 “Preface to the Torchbook Edition” of Personal Knowledge) was a carefully considered, thoughtful philosophical claim. Materials from both before and after the writing of this Torchbook Preface make clear that Polanyi was seriously exploring connections between his emerging epistemic account and ideas developed by Heidegger as well as other modern thinkers who in the sixties often were dubbed “existentialists.”