Abstract

. This paper shows from a close textual study that, although Michael Polanyi used the term “reality” in a generically similar way for what provided the external pole in the natural sciences, mathematics, art, and religion, he consistently made, in Personal Knowledge as well as in later published and unpublished works, a distinction between realities existing independently of our articulate systems in the natural sciences and those existing only in the articulate systems of mathematics, art, and religion. This difference is shown to be the basis for a controversy as to whether or not he should be regarded as a Christian