William H. Poteat (19 April 1919 – 17 May 2000) was an American philosopher, scholar, and professor 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.The Raleigh News & Observer, Tuesday 23 May 2000, obituary of "William H. Poteat". During that time he did foundational work in the critique of Modern and Postmodern intellectual culture. He 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"From a letter addressed to William T. Scott, dated 3 May 1967, explaining the challenge of writing the introductory chapter, "Upon First Sitting Down to Read Personal Knowledge," to Intellect and Hope: Essays in the Thought of Michael Polanyi, edited by Thomas A. Langford and William H. Poteat (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968). In that letter, Poteat writes, "As a practicing dialectician, I have learned one must adopt an attitude of irony in order to understand and elucidate conflicting points of view. What therefore is important is not where I stand at a given moment, but where I stand at the end."
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.David Rutledge, "William Poteat: The Primacy of the Person," Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Journal 40:2 (1013-14), p. 36: "What is distinctive about Poteat's intellectual life is the persistent, tenacious focus on the problem of finding a suitable home within the modern ethos for the human person, a home that would allow that person to claim his or her knowledge, belief, actions, and creations as real, as true, as full of meaning as they are prior to entering upon reflection about them." This task and purpose Poteat came to recognize as profoundly convergent with Michael Polanyi's critique of Modern Critical thought.This theme runs throughout Poteat's Polanyian Meditations: In Search of a Post-Critical Logic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985). His teaching and writing also drew upon and combined in new ways the ideas of seminal critics of modern culture such as Pascal, Kierkegaard, Arendt, Wittgenstein in his later works, and Merleau-Ponty—whose thinking Poteat came to identify as "Post-Critical" (rather than Postmodern),See the explanation of "Post-Critical" in the body of this article. Poteat's first published use of the word appears to be in "Moustákas Within His Ambience," Faith and Art 1:4 (1973), republished in 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). His fullest published discussion is in his book Polanyian Meditations: In Search of a Post-Critical Logic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985). Nevertheless, according to Dale Cannon, one of his Ph.D. students, Poteat used the term in his teaching and conversation long before, possibly with his first exposure to Polanyi's usage of the phrase in the mid-1950s. Sometimes he uses it with the hyphen (post-critical), sometimes without (postcritical), rarely capitalized. using a key concept from Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy.Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1958) 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 McNeill 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 McNeill 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 Isabella Poteat, for many years headed the Art Department at Meredith College.The Raleigh News & Observer, Tuesday 23 May 2000, obituary of "William H. Poteat" and The Raleigh News & Observer, Thursday 25 May 2000, "Remembrances of One Great Teacher," by Jim Jenkins, supplemented by telephone conversations and email messages with Poteat's second wife Patricia Lewis Poteat and James W. Stines, a close family friend and co-editor of The Primacy of Persons and the Language of Culture.
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 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 M.Div.). They had three children, Anne Carlyle, Susan Colquitt, and Edwin McNeill Poteat III.
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.
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 enter the new program. Poteat 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". He later said that he "was thus well begun by this early essay in becoming a Post-Critical thinker,"Polanyian Meditations, p. 6 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.Diane Yeager "Salto Mortale: Poteat and the Righting of Philosophy," Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Journal, 35:2 (2008-09), p. 34: "Poteat complained frequently and colorfully about the philosophical fantasy of the 'deracinate' knower [namely, the knower immortalized in Descartes' conception of the cogito], plucked up out of body and history, and divested of concrete particularity in order to reason impersonally and therefore reliably. Yet his more serious and abiding concern focused on the tendency of philosophical accounts to empty knowing, evaluation, and decision of any vestiges of agency at all." In Poteat's own words, "In fact, as we can now begin to see, the whole of modern culture could be described as an assault upon place, status, and room for personal action by the abstracting intellect." From "Persons and Places," in The Primacy of Persons and the Language of Culture, p. 39.
In 1955 and again in 1957 Poteat traveled to England to speak at and participate in the Student Christian Movement conferences at Oxford University.Email correspondence with Ruel Tyson, 28 October 2013. 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: Towards 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."Polanyian Meditations, p. 6f. Polanyi's authorized biography, Michael Polanyi: Scientist and Philosopher by William Taussig Scott and Martin X. Moleski (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), covers the friendship between Poteat and Polanyi, but makes no mention of their first meeting at Manchester in 1955. See references to "Poteat, William H." in the index of that book.
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.From The Story of the First Twenty-five Years of the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest by Gray M. Blandy and Lawrence L. Brown. Reference provided via email from Nancy Springer-Baldwin, Vice President for Communications, Seminary of the Southwest, 16 August 2013. In 1962 he was a visiting research fellow of Merton College at Oxford.
In 1960 Poteat joined the faculty of the Duke University Divinity School as an 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, which were mainly of a philosophical nature. He brought Michael Polanyi's ideas into his teaching via seminars focusing on Polanyi's magnum opus Personal Knowledge,Polanyian Meditations, p. 7. and he arranged for Polanyi himself to deliver the Duke Lectures for Spring Term of 1964, entitled "Man in Thought".The text of those lectures is accessible online at the Polanyi Society website polanyisociety.org. 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 Edward Pols, Polanyi, and Marjorie Grene; participants included Elizabeth Sewell, John Silber, Iris Murdoch, and Charles Taylor, among others, led by Polanyi, Grene, and Pols.Papers from these meetings were published in The Anatomy of Knowledge: Papers Presented to the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity, Bowdoin College, 1965 and 1966 (Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts Press, 1969) and Toward a Unity of Knowledge, Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity (New York: International Universities Press, 1969). See also Michael Polanyi: Scientist and Philosopher, pp. 258–259 et passim.