William

William H. Poteat

William
#36,924
Most Influential Person Now

American philosopher

William H. Poteat's Academic­Influence.com Rankings

William H. Poteat
Philosophy
#2748
World Rank
#4601
Historical Rank
Logic
#5887
World Rank
#7334
Historical Rank
philosophy Degrees
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Why Is William H. Poteat Influential?

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According to Wikipedia, William H. Poteat was an American philosopher, scholar, and charismatic 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. 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" 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. This task and purpose Poteat came to recognize as profoundly convergent with Michael Polanyi's critique of Modern Critical thought. 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 , and Merleau-Ponty—whose thinking Poteat came to identify as "Post-Critical" , using a key concept from Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. His papers are archived at the Yale Divinity School Library.

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