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:''For other people with names similar to this go to William Poteat (disambiguation).'' William H. Poteat (19 April 1919 – 17 May 2000) was a 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.〔''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 (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 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 MDiv). 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 join 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 (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 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 brought 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/Duke-intro.htm.〕 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.''〕 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.〔''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). An earlier festschrift was published in 1961, no editor listed: ''The Logic of Personal Knowledge: Essays Presented to Michael Polanyi on his Seventieth Birthday'' (London: Rutledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).〕 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 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 met 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".〔Dale Cannon, the principal author of this article, was present at these meetings and was one of those helping to organize them. See Michael Polanyi, ''Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy'' (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1958), chapter 7: "Conviviality.〕 During the 1968-69 academic year, 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 whose vibrant roots in Greek culture and mythology seemed completely free of the influence of the Renaissance-Reformation-Enlightenment perspective that he believed had so desiccated Western art.〔''Polanyian Meditations'', entire Prologue, especially pp. 2–4 and 7–8.〕 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).〔"Evángelos Moustákas: Essays in Form and Line" a brochure prepared by W. Stephen Gardner for the Duke U Art Museum exhibit. There was follow-up exhibit of the same artworks at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Alexandria, 18 Oct-13 November 1970.〕 The transformation of Poteat's thinking resulting from his encounter with Moustákas and his work culminated in his ''Polanyian Meditations: In Search of a Post-Critical Logic'' (1985), its fullest published expression.〔''Polanyian Meditations'', Prologue, pp. 1–10. This paragraph draws on conversations and email messages with Patricia Lewis Poteat.〕 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".〔Email message from Paul Harrison, Professor of Religious Studies, Stanford University, 13 November 2013, and Stanford University Summer Session Catalogue (1970), p. 70.〕 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. In 1969 Poteat was appointed a member of the National Humanities Faculty. He chaired Duke's Department of Religion from 1972 to 1978. 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''.〔See the "Works" section of this article.〕 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. William H. Poteat died on 17 May 2000. His papers are archived at the Yale Divinity School Library. At the time of his death he was survived by his first wife, Marian Kelley, their three children and three grandchildren; his second wife, Patricia Lewis Poteat; and his two sisters. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「William H. Poteat」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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