A physician and physical chemist who became a philosopher in middle age, Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) was born in Budapest, Hungary on March 12, the youngest child in a liberal Jewish family that provided a broad humanistic education. After medical training and completing a dissertation in chemistry, Polanyi rose to be an eminent physical chemist (publishing more than 200 scientific papers in his career) in Berlin; in 1933, he fled Nazi Germany and took a position in Great Britain at Manchester University. He was elected Senior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, in 1959. Polanyi died in Northhampton on February 22.

Science and Society

From the 1930s forward, Polanyi often wrote about the governance of science and the fragile relation between science and society. Marxist-influenced politics and philosophical discussions about the nature and justification of science challenged Polanyi to probe such issues. He found that most of the ideas about science and society...