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William H. Poteat
Born	(1919-04-19)19 April 1919 Kaifeng, Henan, China
Died	17 May 2000(2000-05-17) (aged 81) Durham, North Carolina, United States
Cause of death	Congestive heart failure
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Oberlin College (BA 1941), Yale Divinity School (BD 1944), Duke University (PhD 1951)
Notable work	Polanyian Meditations: In Search of a Post-critical Logic (Dec 1985), A Philosophical Daybook: Post-critical Investigations by William Poteat (Aug 1990), Recovering the Ground: Critical Exercises in Recollection (Oct 1994), The Primacy of Persons and the Language of Culture: Essays by William H. Poteat (Dec 1993)
Awards	Gurney Harris Kearns Fellow (1949), Kent Fellow (1949), Outstanding Teacher at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1955), National Humanities Faculty(1969)
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy (not an adherent of any school)
Institutions	University Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Culture at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University
Main interests	Critique of modern intellectual culture, Post-critical philosophy, philosophical anthropology, existential phenomenology, philosophy of Michael Polanyi
Notable ideas	Existential self-recovery, human as mindbody, pedagogic irony, critique of self-abstracting tendencies of modern intellectual thought, Post-critical philosophy paradigm shift

William H. Poteat (19 April 1919 – 17 May 2000) was a philosopher, scholar, and charismatic teacher of philosophy, religion, and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1947 to 1957 and at Duke University from 1960 to 1987. During that time he did foundational work in the critique of modern and postmodern intellectual culture and was instrumental in introducing scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi and his Post-critical philosophy to the United States. He was a master of the Socratic method of teaching and identified himself a "practicing dialectician," skilled through the use of irony in "understanding and elucidating conflicting points of view". As a Post-critical philosopher he encouraged his students and the readers of his books to recover their authentic selves from the confusing, self-alienating abstractions of modern intellectual life, a view and purpose Poteat considered profoundly convergent with Michael Polanyi's critique of the critical tradition of Modernity and the Age of Enlightenment. His teaching and writing brought into dialogue and creatively drew upon the ideas of seminal critics of modern culture such as Pascal, Kierkegaard, Arendt, Wittgenstein (later works), and Merleau-Ponty — whose thinking Poteat came to identify as Post-critical (rather than Postmodern), using a key concept from Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-critical Philosophy. His papers are archived at the Yale Divinity School Library.

Biography

William Hardman Poteat was born in Kaifeng, Henan, China on 19 April 1919 to Edwin MacNeill Poteat, Jr. and Wilda Hardman Poteat, both Baptist missionaries. His father later served as president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and twice as minister of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. His grandfather, Edwin MacNeill Poteat, Sr., was president of Furman University and in the 1920s his great-uncle, William Louis (Billy) Poteat, had served as president of what is now Wake Forest University. Another great-uncle was Hubert Poteat, a renowned Latin scholar at Wake Forest and an outstanding organist. His great-aunt, Ida Poteat, for many years headed the Art Department at Meredith College.

William Poteat spent the first ten years of his life in China, where his two younger siblings Elisabeth and Haley were also born, before the family moved to North Carolina where in 1937 he completed his high school education in Raleigh. He attended Oberlin College and was awarded the Bachelor of Arts degree with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1941. He then attended the Yale Divinity School, where his primary mentor was the Christian theologian H. Richard Niebuhr.

In 1943 he and Marian K. Kelley were married upon her graduation from Oberlin. He was graduated from Yale in 1944, receiving the Bachelor of Divinity (BD) degree (equivalent to the contemporary Master of Divinity or MDiv).

He and Marian moved to Chapel Hill in the summer of 1944, where he had been hired as General Secretary of the Chapel Hill YMCA, then a center for Christian fellowship and a hub of political and intellectual activity for UNC students. He was invited to teach several courses in the UNC Philosophy Department. The popularity of his courses led to his being hired to teach philosophy as a full-time Instructor in 1947, and by 1955 he had risen to the rank of Associate Professor. He became one of UNC's most popular philosophy teachers, receiving an Outstanding Teacher award in 1955; during the 1956 academic year Carolina students conducted a campaign (unsuccessful) to have him appointed the Chancellor of the University.

Poteat had intended to continue his pursuit of a doctorate in philosophy at Yale, but several factors led him to remain in North Carolina. While enrolled in graduate courses during his studies at Yale, Poteat had become a good friend of Robert Cushman, an aspiring Plato scholar, who was later hired by Duke University to develop a Ph.D. program in Religion. He invited Poteat to join the new program; because Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill are located less than ten miles apart, Poteat could maintain his full-time faculty position at UNC, while taking graduate coursework at Duke during the afternoons. In addition, he and Marian had started a family, with two children born close together, making a major move less attractive. He began his coursework in 1947, was appointed a Gurney Harris Kearns Fellow and a Kent Fellow in 1949, and finished his course work in the spring term of 1950.

Poteat completed his Ph.D. at Duke in 1951 after successfully defending his dissertation, "Pascal and Modern Sensibility", which he recalled having written in just ninety days during the summer of 1950. He later said that he "was thus well begun by this early essay in becoming a Post-critical thinker," having thereby established his lifelong intellectual agenda. Though the dissertation was ostensibly about Pascal, it was actually about what Pascal strove to accomplish: to identify, combat, and overcome the self-abstracting, self-alienating, person-occluding tendencies inherent in modern modes of reflection from the Renaissance forward, epitomized in the ideas of Descartes.

In the early 1950s he joined the Episcopal Church, remaining a member in good standing for the remainder of his life.

In 1955 and again in 1957 Poteat traveled to England to speak at and participate in Student Christian Movement conferences at Oxford University. During his first trip he traveled to Manchester University for his first meeting with scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, beginning a lifelong personal and professional relationship that was to shape much of the course of Poteat's subsequent thinking and research. From Polanyi he received and immediately began reading a typescript of Polanyi's Gifford Lectures (1951–52), which was later revised and published as Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-critical Philosophy (1958). He had first encountered Polanyi's writing in 1952 through an essay called "The Stability of Beliefs" in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, which was incorporated into Personal Knowledge. Poteat reflected on his initial encounter with Polanyi's work as having "accredited and greatly enriched the context within which initially to obey my own intimations."

For three years (1957-1960) he taught at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest at Austin, Texas. Having been a professor of philosophy at UNC, he was asked to develop Christianity and Culture courses there, including courses in Philosophical Theology and Christian Criticism. In 1962 he was a Visiting Research Fellow of Merton College at Oxford, researching the philosophy of religious language.

In 1960 Poteat joined the faculty of the Duke University Divinity School as the Associate Professor of Christianity and Culture. Like other members of Duke's Divinity School faculty, he regularly taught graduate courses for the Department of Religion. He brought Michael Polanyi's ideas into his teaching via seminars focusing on Polanyi's magnum opus Personal Knowledge, and he brought Polanyi himself to deliver the Duke Lectures for the 1964-65 academic year, entitled "Man in Thought". Poteat was also a participant in the Polanyi-centered Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity in August 1965 and August 1966 at Bowdoin College, organized by Polanyi, Edward Pols, and Marjorie Grene; participants included Elizabeth Sewell, John Silber, Iris Murdoch, Charles Taylor, among others, led by Polanyi, Grene, and Pols).

In the summer of 1968 he and his colleague Thomas A. Langford completed editorial work on Intellect and Hope: Essays in the Thought of Michael Polanyi, published that year by Duke University Press for the Lilly Endowment's Research Program in Christianity and Politics. This book, a festschrift, was one of the first book-length interdisciplinary discussions of Polanyi's philosophical work by major scholars in the U.S. and Europe. Also in 1968, Poteat transferred from the Duke Divinity School to teach full time in Duke's Department of Religion as Professor of Religion and Comparative Studies. That move enabled him to concentrate more on teaching graduate seminars and directing doctoral theses, while teaching one undergraduate course each semester, which he continued to do until his retirement in 1987.

That same year a group of Poteat's current and former graduate students gathered in a retreat setting at Fort Caswell, South Carolina, to share in the intellectual friendship that they had enjoyed under his mentorship and to ponder some of the many issues he had posed for them to consider. Poteat himself joined the following year, when the group at a retreat center in the mountains near Dutch Creek Falls, North Carolina. The meetings continued approximately annually under a number of names including "the Poteat Bunch", "La Cosa Nostra della Poteat", and "The Dutch Creek Falls Symposium", concluding in 1975 just outside of Chapel Hill. At subsequent gatherings devoted to Poteat's work held by the Polanyi Society, participants concurred that, in contrast to the hypercritical intellectuality typifying modern academic culture, the gatherings exhibited a quality of Post-critical intellectual life often described and celebrated in Polanyi's writing and underscored by Poteat, namely "conviviality", and that the group exemplified a "convivial order". William Bretiman of Goldsboro, a longtime friend of the family, is quoted in Poteat's obituary: "One of Bill's favorite words was 'convivial,' and he was a convivial man. He knew that it is our conviviality, our enjoyment of our own and others' lives, that marks us...".

During the fall semester of 1968, Poteat went to Greece (principally Athens) for a sabbatical to study ancient Greek art and culture. Soon after his arrival he happened to encounter the art and subsequently the person of the renowned Greek sculptor Evángelos Moustákas, which occasioned a profound reformation of his thinking and completely disrupted his sabbatical plans. He later characterized this encounter as "an Orphic dismemberment. The intellectual categories upon which I had relied no longer fit. My whole being—my mindbodily being—was riven."

Poteat had long pursued serious study of visual art, drama, and literature, weaving those themes deeply into his teaching. He recognized Moustákas to be an artist with vibrant roots in Greek culture and mythology, completely free of the influence of the Renaissance-Reformation-Enlightenment sensibility that he believed had so desiccated Western art. In the spring of 1970 he arranged an exhibition for Moustákas's sculpture and visual art at the Duke University Gallery of Art (8 March to 3 May). The transformation of Poteat's worldview resulting from his encounter with Moustákas and his work culminated in his Polanyian Meditations: Toward a Post-critical Logic (1985), its fullest published expression.

In the summer following the Moustákas exhibition, Poteat taught two courses at Stanford University as a visiting professor: "Eroticism, Music, and Madness" and "Religion and Art". The following spring he taught the former course again at the University of Texas at Austin. For three consecutive years in the 1970s he also taught an honors seminar for juniors at UNC-Greensboro, to which he commuted for over an hour each way amidst his regular teaching duties at Duke. In 1969 Poteat was appointed a member of the National Humanities Faculty. He chaired Duke's Department of Religion from 1972 to 1978.

Following a separation and divorce from his wife Marian, he married Patricia Lewis in 1980.

After his retirement from the Duke faculty in 1987, Poteat continued to supervise a few Ph.D. students and authored two books: A Philosophical Daybook: Post-critical Investigations (1990) and Recovering the Ground: Critical Exercises in Recollection (1994). In 1993, two former students, James M. Nickell and James W. Stines, edited and provided an introduction to a collection of twenty-three of Poteat's essays, most published between 1953 and 1981, entitled The Primacy of Persons and the Language of Culture. From 1994 to 1999 his wife Patricia Lewis Poteat served as President of Athens College in Greece (a part of the State University of New York system). There he taught courses, without charge, in the College's adult education program.

After an extended illness, William H. Poteat died of congestive heart failure on 17 May 2000 at home in Durham. A memorial service was held in the Duke Chapel on 24 May 2000, where three generations of his students gathered to honor him. At his death his attending physician called him "a true prince of life."

His papers are archived at the the Yale Divinity School Library].

Teaching and ideas

To understand what teaching was for William Poteat, it is important to realize what he sought primarily to accomplish — specifically in his teaching, and generally in his intellectual endeavors — according to those most closely associated with him as Ph.D. students. It was no ordinary matter of conveying information and understanding, nor helping his students gain mastery of difficult ideas and texts so that they in turn could be in a position to help their students gain such mastery — although these tasks were unavoidably involved.

His primary aim in teaching was to provoke in his students a fundamental shift in sensibility and perspective from the mode of Critical intellection and reflection that characterizes Modernity and predominates in the academic world, to what he and Michael Polanyi called a Post-critical mode of thinking. Instead of attending solely to the what of a topic (an item of content, a teaching, a matter to be subjected to intellectual mastery and critique as an indifferent object of thought), the shift causes one to become continuously aware of the how of intellection itself — specifically to the how of one's responsive relationship to that intellection as person in the world — to how one happens to be relating oneself to it. That how awareness is predominantly tacit and not articulable within one's mental monologue or otherwise, which causes it to be all the more potentially consequential in the process of knowing.

Poteat and Polanyi understood the Post-critical mode to be the essential corrective and natural successor to the Critical approach to knowing, which tends to lose track of the how of knowing while presuming a relationship of hypercritical suspicion, guarded distance, and objectification to achieve "objective knowledge," from which personal presence and involvement are withheld. By judging personal involvement in the process of knowing to be illegitimate, because it adulterates the objectivity of what is to be known, certain inherently personal features of that knowledge are abstracted, including most notably the presence of the subject who is doing the knowing and who is indwelling the context and facts of that knowing. In their view, the Critical mode of thinking operates under the unacknowledged presumption that only such a depersonalized relationship can result in unadulterated truth. As a consequence it is for the most part oblivious to the distortions attendant to such an impoverished and reductive relationship. In Poteat's own words,

. . . it is the perennial temptation of critical thought to demand total explicitness in all things, to bring all background into foreground, to dissolve the tension between the focal things, to bring all background into foreground, to dissolve the tension between the focal and the subsidiary by making everything focal, to dilute the temporal and intentional thickness of perception, to dehistoricize thought, . . . to lighten every shadowy place, to dig up and aerate the roots of our being, to make all interiors exterior, to unsituate all reflection from time and space, to discarnate mind, to define knowledge as that which can be grasped by thought in an absolutely lucid 'moment' and without temporal extension, to flatten out all epistemic hierarchy, to homogenize all logical heterogeneity . . .

In its idolization of objectivity, the Critical perspective tends to lose entirely the dimension of knowing that becomes available only through personal presence, "mindbodily" participation, empathy, caring, and thoughtful hospitality — all aspects of what Poteat and Polanyi refer to as indwelling. Thus the Critical mode devalues the sensitive and respectful interpretation that takes into account not only the relationship of what and how, but also the relationship of the knower and the known, leaving in its place a colorless, purposeless, meaningless, and exceedingly incomplete world of impersonal objects subject to unchecked manipulation.

Poteat demonstrated to his students that making the shift to a Post-critical mode of thinking requires escaping from the largely subconscious and profoundly self-alienating abstractedness of the Critical mode — the "default mode" of Modernity. As one is able to break free, he taught, the way is cleared to be more at one with one's authentic self, more fully present to the authentic selves of others and to the things of the world with which one is concerned. As that happens, an acute, deeply personal awareness develops of those self-alienating tendencies and their tragic consequences. That awareness supplants hypercritical suspicion as the driving, central motive of thought. In its place one discovers the Post-critical sensibility, centered on the recovery of a passionate methodological faith in the tacit intimations of a unified reality that reveals itself inexhaustibly and transcends the former split between the personal knower and the depersonalized object of knowledge.

Poteat accomplished this pedagogical feat through a combination of an ironic stance, whereby he deliberately made impossible any simple, straightforward taking in of what he might have to convey, and a skillful use of the Socratic method to question, draw out, and bring to light the implications of his students' own thoughts and ideas on the text under consideration and the issues it raised. A close friend and later a colleague at UNC-Chapel Hill, Ruel Tyson, spoke of him as "the most consistent, most unrelenting practitioner of Socratic dialectic of any teacher I have had or known in over 65 years in the classroom as student and teacher."

Poteat typically conducted this process of discovery and reorientation during seminar discussions about assigned texts. Along with Polanyi's Personal Knowledge and his own Polanyian Meditations, such texts included Ricouer's Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, and Kierkegaard's works, particularly his essay "The Immediate Stages of the Erotic or the Musical Erotic" in Either/Or vol. 1. In those books their authors undertook a radical critique of the "prepossessions of the European Enlightenment concerning the nature of human knowing and doing." In those texts, according to Poteat, "modern culture... is under the maximum radical pressure from the author [who]..., therefore, most vividly discloses — sometimes wittingly but more often unwittingly — the repertoire of concepts in which both we and the author are immured. Usually these are profoundly confused books, for no author is so likely edifyingly to exhibit his or her embranglement in those very destructive conceptual dualisms which define modernity as when he or she undertakes to bring them explicitly under attack."

Later in his life he described the principal focus of this teaching effort in the following words:

[It was] a sustained critical colloquy with three generations of graduate students set among a half-dozen or so "canonical" volumes in the context of our mutual search for the imagination's way out of what Walker Percy has called the 'old modern age.'

I, and my students in the measure to which they have truly joined the colloquy, have from the outset aspired to be radically critical of the Critical tradition of Modernity, which is to say, we have undertaken to become postcritical.

Like any parasite, this essentially polemical convivium has battened on its host, hoping, not to weaken and eventually bring down, but, rather, modestly to change the universities in which it was formed and by whose sufferance it has lived. At least those of us who have sustained this colloquy have hoped to be and have changed.

An example of the "profound confusion" Poteat cited in the texts he assigned can be noted in Patricia Lewis Poteat's commentary on Percy in Walker Percy and the Old Modern Age: Reflections on Language, Argument, and the Telling of Stories".: "Percy's conceptual vision becomes progressively more blurred as his style and vocabulary become progressively less anecdotal or narrative and more analytical and abstract — hence ever more anchored in the concrete particulars of persons in predicaments." She suggests that in his philosophical essays "he often falls into the very Cartesian dualism his fiction condemns". Another example vividly illustrating Poteat's pedagogy comes from Araminta Stone Johnson, self-described as "one of Bill Poteat's 'last' students', in "Thanks For Everything, Poteat!: An Intellectual (But Personal) Autobiography" in the Polanyi Society Journal Tradition and Discovery:

[Paul] Ricoeur's Freud and Philosophy... is a ponderous tome, and it was the assigned reading for the first class I had with Poteat. ... The "thing" that Ricouer was doing and that Poteat wanted us to experience, not just "see", was Ricoeur’s not-so-latent Cartesianism. Poteat was convinced that in order for us to know something different from the Cartesian water that we swam in, it was necessary for us to struggle and struggle; ... It was only because I had struggled ... with Poteat and my fellow students that I could later see the same pattern in [other works].

Although Poteat drew heavily on that limited core of texts for his teaching methodology, particularly at Duke, his teaching ranged over a very wide scope to incorporate most aspects of the history of Western culture, Renaissance visual art, tragedy, ancient Greek culture, the interaction between Greek and Hebrew metaphysics, existentialism, ordinary language philosophy, theory of myth and symbol, religious language, philosophy of science, phenomenology, philosophical psychology, and philosophical anthropology.

A close friend and colleague at UNC-Chapel Hill, E. Maynard Adams, at the time of Poteat's death characterized him as a "learned man who exuded a joy in living — one of the colleagues from whom I learned the most and an inspired teacher." Said Adams, "I still find people, many of them prominent people, who tell me having Bill Poteat as a teacher was the most meaningful thing in their lives." As a friend, what Adams enjoyed most was Poteat's warm wit, and a "great joy in life that was contagious. He had friends; he made friends." Adams and others recognized his personal connections with students — legacies that are living and breathing still. Those connections, Adams believes, came about because of "the way in which he interpreted life for them. He gave them a sense that life wasn't just a matter of getting what you want and getting by from day to day or year to year or job to job or from birth to the grave. He taught them that one should have a sense of purpose, a sense of meaningfulness in living, and should find self-fulfillment in one's life, in one's work, in one's relationships."

Writing and ideas

William Poteat was an original thinker, but also an extraordinarily agile one — in conversation, in teaching, and in writing. Consequently, many of his ideas start with, draw upon, and build upon the ideas of other thinkers, but develop them in ways that might have surprised their originators. As previously indicated, his students were often amazed to discover what was implied and presupposed by their own ideas in ways that might never have come to light had Poteat not drawn them out, usually while withholding his own opinions on the subject to enable his students to develop in their own ways. At times it wasn't clear to the student whether there was a difference between her own ideas and Poteat's.

A similar process was at work when during class discussion and in published writing Poteat presented and explored ideas of Wittgenstein or Polanyi or Merleau-Ponty among many others. Poteat would at times call attention to certain ideas of a particular thinker at one point and their tension or conflict with other ideas of the same thinker at another point, with the comment that (for example) Polanyi evidently did not realize what he was saying, what he meant to say, or what he should have said, and was not being true to his (Polanyi's) deepest insight at this point as he was at the other point. Poteat was extraordinarily alert to ambiguities and nuances in language, and he mentored his students in developing a similar alertness in themselves. Although the awareness of subtle ambiguity facilitates the full comprehension of an idea, it produces the tendency found in many of his published works (and sometimes also in his students' writing) parenthetically to qualify and explain the precise sense of a word or phrase in the midst of an otherwise long and complex sentence, sometimes two or three times in a single convoluted sentence. On the other hand, Poteat often took what he was convinced to be one of these writers' key insights and, appropriating it to himself, drew its implications and developed it far beyond what the original writer made of it — especially evident in his book Polanyian Meditations. Not that he claimed their insight as his own, but rather that he sought by the aid of their insight to achieve a greater understanding of the realities that they sought to articulate and their deeper implications.

One such idea, derived from both Michael Polanyi and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is Poteat's conception of the mindbody (a term he coined): persons are neither (simply) minds in bodies nor (simply) bodies with minds, especially not in the discrete form conceived by Descartes. Instead persons are mindbodies, both minds and bodies at once, one and the same, inextricably at once in every aspect, such that "mind" and "body" taken separately are seriously distorting abstractions from the whole person. According to Poteat, one's mindbody is one's place in the world, the "oriented whence" of all of one's activities and the place by means of which, and only in relation to which, all other places and things can make any sense at all. In other words, the mindbody is the sentient, motile, and oriented self — the active center of every person's life.

Among the most significant ideas Poteat extended from a previous thinker was one he had already conceived in a variety of different terms and phrases prior to his encounter with Michael Polanyi. He found Post-critical in Polanyi's Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-critical Philosophy to accurately name and define the shift he perceived beyond the Critical intellectual sensibility that has defined intellectual thinking in the Modern era, particularly since the Enlightenment period. As articulated originally by Descartes, the Critical mode of inquiry seeks to arrive at the undistorted truth by filtering one's encounter with reality through a lens of extreme suspicion and doubt. Since its emergence as the predominant epistemic paradigm of the modern era, the Critical mode has been assailed by many of the thinkers mentioned previously for breeding a pervasive skepticism toward higher-order realities and ideals. Inherent meaning, purpose, and value are filtered out, surviving only as arbitrary or evolved creations of the human mind, thereby contributing to an attitude of rootlessness, nihilism, and despair.

In the view of Poteat and Polanyi, Post-critical designates the shift to a profound recognition of something quite different that is unrecognized and unrecognizable by the Critical mode yet vital to all genuine intellectual inquiry: a tacit methodological faith accompanied by an intellectual passion to discover truth and make sense of things. To recognize and embrace this truth, Poteat discovered, requires not only an intellectual breakthrough but an existential transformation: from a detached, withdrawn, attitude and withheld faith and passion to a pouring forth into whatever field of inquiry of one's personal presence, empathy, and creative powers — actively reaching out to apprehend and indwell yet-undisclosed intimations of truth and reality in whatever field of inquiry.

One of the distinctive philosophical methodologies employed by Poteat in his teaching and particularly in his later writing is closely akin to what some writers (especially Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception) have called "existential phenomenology" or just phenomenology. Rather than pursuing this methodology systematically, as many known phenomenologists have attempted to do, in his teaching and writing Poteat calls attention to normally tacit aspects of a person's "mindbodily" being in the world of which a person is usually not reflectively aware or able to articulate. It is the very abstractedness of one's usual patterns of thinking and the resulting limitation of what we can conceive to only that which can be made explicit that keep us unaware of such tacit aspects of experience, without which reality as a whole cannot be comprehended. Poteat seeks to have us awaken to those tacit aspects and then to appropriate them as extensions of ourselves, grounding us reflectively in our own mindbodily being in the world.

Others among Poteat's principal ideas include:

• the dialectic of self-absentation and self-presence;
• the recovery of, and responsibly owning up to, oneself as incarnate person among persons (linking profoundly with key emphases in Christian and Jewish existentialism and their roots in the traditions of spirituality at their source;
• the fact that human beings are not merely animals with a gift for human language, but that as persons we come into being and realize ourselves through language
• the resources of reflexive self-reference in language, particularly the first-person singular nominative pronoun "I" and other reflexive pronouns that are the paradigmatic means of signifying the tacit personal presence that we are
• the "metaphorical intentionalities" of our words;
• finding our true selves in the act of speaking and writing both "to have and be in the midst of a picture" of ourselves in the world
• concrete embodied temporality (with the manifold particular "pretensions" and "retrotensions" of our intentionality) versus abstract and homogenized clock-time
• concrete places and the "here" of one's mindbody versus abstract and homogenized space and spatial location
• the dominance of the visual sensorium (versus, for example, the auditory sensorium) and its tendency to objectify and exteriorize our sensibility, prevailing since the advent of Renaissance art and the culture of print
• Western culture being in unstable yet creative tension between key concepts from both Hellenic and Hebrew culture.

For additional examples, see his works listed in the next section.

Works

• The Primacy of Persons and the Language of Culture: Essays by William H. Poteat, edited by James M. Nickell and James W. Stines (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1993). (Collection of essays published by Poteat between 1953 and 1981, along with some unpublished essays.)
• Intellect and Hope: Essays on the Thought of Michael Polanyi, edited by Thomas A. Langford and William H. Poteat (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968). Poteat is the author of three of the essays included in this volume: "Upon Sitting Down to Read Personal Knowledge...: An Introduction", pp. 3–18; "Myths, Stories, History, Eschatology and Action: Some Polanyian Meditations", pp. 198–231, and "Appendix", pp. 449–455, which explains Polanyi's unusual use of the concept "unspecifiable" in in connection with his account of tacit knowledge.
• Polanyian Meditations: In Search of a Post-critical Logic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985).
• A Philosophical Daybook: Post-critical Investigations (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990).
• Recovering the Ground: Critical Exercises in Recollection (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994).
• "Cezanne and the Numinous Power of the Real" (1998), unpublished manuscript.

See also

• Post-critical philosophy
• Blaise Pascal
• Søren Kierkegaard
• H. Richard Niebuhr
• Michael Polanyi
• Hannah Arendt
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• John Macmurray
• W. H. Auden
• William Faulkner
• Walker Percy
• Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
• Denis de Rougemont

Further reading

Several issues of Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical have been dedicated to discussions of the thought of William H. Poteat: XX:1 (1993–94), XXI:1 (1994–95), XXV:2 (2008-2009), and XXVI:2 (2009-2010). These issues are accessible online without charge at polanyisociety.org.

External links

• William H. Poteat website
• William H. Poteat archive of unpublished works at the Yale Divinity School Library.
• Stanford web page on Existential Phenomenology
• Stanford web page on Gabriel Marcel
• University of Tennessee at Martin web page on Martin Buber
• Stanford web page on Paul Ricoeur

References

Category:1919 births Category:2000 deaths Category:20th-century philosophers Category:American philosophers Category:Continental philosophers Category:Critics of postmodernism Category:Critics of modernity Category:Duke University faculty Category:People from Raleigh, North Carolina Category:University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty