5 ms·

Polanyi’s work on intuition is incredible. The tendency (which I think came from Kuhn’s reading) to view Polanyi as some kind of relativist is a complete rever

Polanyi’s work on intuition is incredible. The tendency (which I think came from Kuhn’s reading) to view Polanyi as some kind of relativist is a complete reversal and devaluation of what he actually wrote. EDIT: in my view, the most rigorous examination and definition of intuition comes from Rosmini, and overlaps with that of Polanyi, but the latter is much easier.

heyoni 5y ago
Got any reading recommendations from the two for a complete outsider to the field (psychology?).
- huetius 5y ago
  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.
lliamander 5y ago
I read Personal Knowledge back in college, and was impressed at how he'd managed to reintroduce the Aristotelian concept of telos back into science via the disciplines of biology and technology. That is, biology and technology are disciplines which study processes, and a process cannot be understood without a concept of goal or purpose. For example, a liver is defined by a particular process of filtering blood, moreso than by its material components. That's why we can talk about artificial livers (or other organs) as still being a liver even if it is made from completely different material components than a natural liver.

heyoni 5y ago

Got any reading recommendations from the two for a complete outsider to the field (psychology?).

huetius 5y ago
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.

lliamander 5y ago

I read Personal Knowledge back in college, and was impressed at how he'd managed to reintroduce the Aristotelian concept of telos back into science via the disciplines of biology and technology. That is, biology and technology are disciplines which study processes, and a process cannot be understood without a concept of goal or purpose. For example, a liver is defined by a particular process of filtering blood, moreso than by its material components. That's why we can talk about artificial livers (or other organs) as still being a liver even if it is made from completely different material components than a natural liver.