In Polanyian Meditations: In Search of a Post-Critical Logic, Poteat draws upon Polanyi to explicate what he calls an “oral/aural logic,” which he thinks informs Polanyi’s thought and which is different from the conventional “visual logic” of the Western philosophical tradition, and then argues that this oral/aural logic is implied in the Hebraic understanding of reality. This idea is a key to understanding the genesis of the modern worldview, which can be conceptualized as involving certain elements of the Hebraic worldview (...) distorted byan excessively visual orientation. (shrink)

The author responds to reviews of two of his works, eventually extending the analysis of both books to argue that Michael Polanyi and William H. Poteat have, in their epistemological and phenomenological theories, articulated what amounts to a conception of the Holy Spirit in non-theological terminology, but that this conception needs to be more explicitly theologically informed to be refined.

Argues that rebuilding ethical communities will require a cultural reorientation from visually dominated to oral/aural experience and develops a speech-based conception of moral place that can set limits on the actions of individuals and communities.

The author argues that Michael Polanyi’s philosophy of science can be understood as an (unconscious) attempt to recapture elements of experience largely forgotten or repressed in modernity. Specifically, the author argues that Polanyi’s epistemology appears to draw on elements of oral—aural experience that have been relatively ignored by the heavily visual sensory orientation typical of modern Western societies. The author does this by first deriving the primary features of the modern objectivist conception of knowledge from Polanyi’s critique of objectivism and (...) then using the anthropological literature on the differences between oral and literate cultures to demonstrate that these same aspects of the objectivist paradigm correspond closely to typical features of literate, visual consciousness while Polanyi’s alternative formulations correspond to a more oral—aural orientation. (shrink)