Könnerschaft und implizites Wissen

Georg Hans Neuweg, Jahrgang 1965, ist Universitätsprofessor an der Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Österreich, und leitet die dortige Abteilung für Wirtschafts- und Berufspädagogik. Arbeitsschwerpunkte: Implizites Wissen, Allgemeine Didaktik, Wirtschaftsdidaktik, Lehrerbildung, schulische Leistungsbeurteilung, Achtsamkeit und Meditation.

"Michael Polanyi is hardly known in Germany today. His work outside of physical chemistry is not available in German, with the exception of the "Tacit Dimension" (available in a rather inexact translation) and the Eddington lectures ("Beyond nihilism"). Language is not the only problem for his reception or lack thereof, however. There are at least two further problems which make Polanyi almost inaccessible to the German reader. One is his style of scholarship. Writing essentially for an English-Language Audience, he presents even his greatest breakthroughs as if they were common sense. German Language readers simply do not know where to put him in intellectual history, unless they are very well trained philosophers. The other problem is that Polanyi wrestled with the problems posed and solutions found by the southwestgerman school of philosophy and sociology with is practically extinct, and does this, of course, implicitly. He even misleads the reader who is not too careful into believing that he is following the lead of Dilthey. –