Struan Jacobs

Deakin University · Centre for Citizenship, Development and Human Rights

Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi corresponded with each other for the best part of thirty years. They had shared interests that included science, social science, economics, epistemology, history of ideas and political philosophy. Studying their correspondence and related writings, this article shows that Hayek and Polanyi were committed Liberals...

Key Words: tradition, knowledge, science, freedom, rationalism. Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper offer contrasting accounts of social tradition. Popper is steeped in the heritage of the Enlightenment, while Polanyi interweaves religious and diverse secular strands of thought. Explaining the liberal tradition, Polanyi features tacit knowledge of rule...

Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi grew up in central Europe and, having escaped from Nazism, went on to pursue academic careers in Britain where they wrote prolifically on science and politics. Popper and Polanyi corresponded with each other, and met for discussions in the late 1940s and early 50s, but they seldom referred to each other in their publ...

C. P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” controversially contrasted science and literature, suggesting that neither scientists nor literary intellectuals have much in common with, and seldom bother speaking to, the other. Responding to Snow, Michael Polanyi argued that specialization has made modern culture, not twofold but manifold. In his major work, Pers...

Knowledge-in-Practice in the Caring Professions explores the nature and role of knowledge in the practical work of the caring professions. It focuses on knowledge of the practical over the theoretical, looking at the application of theory and the implementation of skill, judgment and discretion. Contents: Introduction, Heather D’Cruz, Struan Jacobs...

In his writings between 1941 and 1951, Michael Polanyi developed a distinctive view of liberal social and political life. Planned organizations are a part of all modern societies, according to Polanyi, but in liberal modernity he highlighted dynamic social orders whose agents freely adjust their efforts in light of the initiatives and accomplishmen...

In 1938, Joseph Oldham, a leading British Christian ecumenist, formed a discussion group that came to be known as the Moot. The Moot met in a retreat setting for several long weekends each year until early 1947, its discussions carefully organized and convened by Oldham. More than anything else, the discussions of the Moot revolved around the topic...

In this article the authors explore how the print media contribute to information and education of the community on issues of safety and quality in the health services, since this is an important avenue of such information and education for many members of the community. The authors undertook a qualitative study of a random sample of articles in th...

This essay reviews historical records that set forth the discussions and interaction of Michael Polanyi and Karl Mannheim from 1944 until Mannheim’s death early in 1947. The letters describe Polanyi’s effort to assemble a book to be published in a series edited by Manneheim. They also reveal the different perspectives these thinkers took about free...

Recently, two seemingly divergent approaches have emerged in outcomes-based medical research. Proponents of evidence-based medicine (EBM) argue that the most effective treatments will be found by adopting a hierarchical approach that gives pre-eminence to randomized controlled clinical trials, where these are available. Proponents of participatory...

Kuhn and Feyerabend have little to say about the thought of Michael Polanyi, and the secondary literature on Polanyi's relation to them is meagre. I argue that Polanyi's view, in Personal knowledge and in other writings, of conceptual frameworks ‘segregated’ by a ‘logical gap’ as giving rise to controversies in science foreshadowed Kuhn and Feyerab...

This paper compares Hayek and Polanyi on spontaneous social order. Although Hayek is widely believed to have first both coined the name and explicated the idea of ‘spontaneous order’, it is in fact Michael Polanyi who did so. Numerous differences emerge between the two thinkers. The characterisation of spontaneous order in Hayek, for example, invol...

Rich in insights, groundbreaking in its interpretations, Personal Knowledge deserves to be better known. Modestly contributing to this end, the present paper explains why teachers addressing the nature of science should spend time on Polanyi. Outlining his intellectual career (from medicine to the cutting edge of chemical research, to the analysis...

Michael Polanyi is well known as a theorist of science but his social-economicpolitical writings have never received adequate coverage. This neglect needs to be remedied because his system of liberal ideas is deeply interesting, persistently relevant, and historically significant as the following discussion will show. Being an unfamiliar figure to...

Locke scholars continue to disagree over how he analyzed natural laws, real essence-power relations in physical substances. Some say he regarded them as emanations, necessitated by the corpuscular structure of real essences; for others his laws are adventitious, imposed on substances by God and contingent on divine alterable will. The second view h...

It is a testimony to the enduring importance of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that, 30 years on, its doctrines of normal science and paradigm, incommensurability and revolution continue to challenge metascien tists and stimulate vigorous debate. Critique has mainly come from philosophers and historians; by and large, interes...

For an idea so central to the thought of a figure so prominent in the history of political philosophy, John Stuart Mill's ‘tyranny of the majority’ has been badly neglected. In this paper examination of strategic texts leads to the conclusions that Mill developed different conceptions of majority tyranny focussed on the middle class and the labouri...

John Stuart Mill on Induction and Hypotheses STRUANJACOBS SINCE ITS APPEARANCE in 1843, John Stuart Mill's great work of epistemology and metascience, A System of Logic, has been closely studied as a philosophical text, but its composition and the revisions Mill made to its several editions have been largely overlooked. Historians of ideas have bee...

John Gray's recent critique of liberalism, and his case for an apparently relativistic “post‐Pyrrhonian”; political philosophy, are shown to be wanting. Weaknesses in Gray's critique are identified and discussed: the characterization of liberalism as universally prescriptive, confusion about whether liberalism is a genuine tradition, and misunderst...

This paper considers leading ideas of Albert Ellis on psychological theory and therapy in relation to ideas of the celebrated philosopher, Karl Popper. The aim is to indicate striking similarities in their views on learning, the genesis of emotional disturbance and, in particular, rationality. Discussion commences with Popper's early, and little st...