Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) was born in Budapest, qualified in medicine there in 1913 and served as a medical officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War before turning to physical chemistry. From 1920 he worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin, doing research on X-ray diffraction, adsorption and reaction rates, and he resigned in 1933 when the new German government's laws forced out Jewish scholars. He held the chair of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester from 1933 and in 1948 exchanged it for a chair in social studies. He wrote in defence of the freedom of science against proposals for its central planning, gave the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen in 1951–52, and after 1958 was a senior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford. His later books include The Tacit Dimension (1966).
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy was published in 1958 by Routledge and Kegan Paul in London and by the University of Chicago Press. Its author, Michael Polanyi, had been a physician and a distinguished physical chemist before turning to philosophy, and the book grew from his Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1951–52.
