Michael Polanyi

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Michael Polanyi (1933)

Michael Polanyi (born March 12, 1891 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary ; died February 22, 1976 in Manchester ) was a Hungarian - British chemist and philosopher . The economist Karl Polanyi was his brother.

life and work

Michael Polanyi was born the fifth child into a liberal Jewish family. His father, Mihaly Pollacsek, was a successful railroad engineer and owner , his mother was born in Vilnius as Cecile Wohl . In 1890 Pollacsek hungarized his name to Polányi. In 1900 the father had to stop operating his railway line after a storm and went bankrupt.

Physical chemist

After completing his medical degree in Budapest in 1913, Polanyi began studying chemistry at the TH Karlsruhe . The conscription as a medical officer of Austria-Hungary in the First World War interrupted his studies, Polanyi was only rarely on duty due to illness. After receiving his doctorate in physical chemistry in Budapest (with Gustav Buchböck ) in 1919, he returned to Karlsruhe, where he met his wife Magda Elizabeth Kemény, also a chemist. The two sons George (1922–1975, economist) and John (born 1929, chemist in Toronto, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1986) emerged from their marriage in 1921 .

Polanyi moved to Berlin in 1920, where he finally took over the management of a department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Fiber Chemistry . With the mathematical foundations he laid for the analysis of fiber scattering images, he founded the field of fiber diffraction . In 1923 he moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry (today the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society ). Because of the increasing persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and especially under the impact of the Reichstag fire , Polanyi accepted a call to the chair of physical chemistry in Manchester in 1933 , which he held until 1948. In 1962 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

One of his outstanding achievements is the interpretation of the plastic deformability of crystals through the mechanism of dislocation , which he published in 1934 at the same time as two other, independent discoverers. Polanyi is also considered to be the founder of the newer chemical reaction kinetics together with Henry Eyring .

Sociologist and philosopher

In his first philosophical publications, Polanyi was of the opinion that the foundation of all research is the power of independent thought and the motive of the search for truth; His position on the philosophy of science was first presented in 1946 in Science, Faith and Society . The establishment of a specially created chair for social sciences in Manchester released Polanyi from all teaching duties in 1948 and allowed him to focus on the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen ( 1951/52), from which he developed his main philosophical work Personal Knowledge (1958) over a period of nine years . After his retirement in 1959 he went to the Merton College of Oxford University .

In the USA, where he gave several series of lectures, Polanyi met with a higher response. The Terry Lectures of 1962 at Yale University were revised in 1966 as The Tacit Dimension . Another collection of central essays Polanyis from the years 1959-1968 appeared in 1969 under the title Knowing and Being . His last monograph, Meaning , from 1975 , which contains Polanyi's lectures at the universities of Texas and Chicago from 1969 to 1971, was dedicated to the newly acquired focus of his work .

In 1997 Richard T. Allen published a posthumous compilation of Polanyi's articles under the title Society, economics & philosophy: selected papers .

Michael Polanyi's philosophy has become very important for the Anglo-Saxon conversation between science and theology.

Fonts

  • Atomic reactions. 1932.
  • The Contempt of Freedom. 1940.
  • Full Employment and Free Trade. 1945.
  • The Logic of Liberty. 1951, ISBN 0-226-67296-4 .
  • The Study of Man. 1959.
  • Beyond nihilism. Reidel, 1961.
  • Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. 1964, ISBN 0-226-67288-3 .
  • Implicit knowledge. ( The tacit dimension. 1966). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-518-28143-7 .
  • Knowing and Being. 1969.
  • with H. Prosch: Meaning. 1975, ISBN 0-226-67294-8 .

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Judith Szapor: An Outsider Twice Over: Cecile well Pollacsek, Salonist of Fin-de-Siecle Budapest . In: Judith Szapor (ed.): Jewish Intellectual Women in Central Europe 1860–2000: twelve biographical essays . Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2012 ISBN 978-0-7734-2933-8 , pp. 29-58
  2. ^ Eckart Henning , Marion Kazemi : Dahlem, Domain of Science. Publications from the archive of the Max Planck Society, Berlin, 2009, ISBN 3-927579-16-5
  3. ↑ M. Polanyi: Journal of Physics. Volume 89, 1934, p. 660
  4. ^ Science, Faith and Society 1946, ISBN 9780226672908 .
  5. ↑ Cf. Andreas Losch, The importance of Michael Polanyi for the discussion of theology and natural sciences, in: Glaube und Denk 21 (2008) 151-181.
personal data
SURNAME Polanyi, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-British chemist and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH February 22, 1976
Place of death Manchester