Abstract

In this paper I argue that there are good reasons for not reading the last part of Polanyi’s book Personal Knowledge (1958) as the outline of a finalistic metaphysics, as proposed recently by Haught and Yeager, but rather as a modest speculative attempt to fulfill the requirements of a Gifford Lecturer, namely to treat of the relation between God and the world. Apart from the background of the writing of the book, I suggest that the predicament of theism in the contemporary antimetaphysical climate and Polanyi’s emphasis onreligious practice, rather than metaphysical theorizing, as the locus of meaning in his other writings on religion, support this reading as well.