William H. Poteat
| William H. Poteat | |
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Bill Poteat, Duke University, circa 1985
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| Born |
19 April 1919 Kaifeng, Henan, China |
| Died | 17 May 2000 (aged 81) Durham, North Carolina, 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 (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 Faculty of the Humanities (1969) |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental philosophy |
| Institutions | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University |
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Main interests
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Philosophical Anthropology, critique of Cartesian-modernist intellectual culture, Post-Critical, Philosophy of Michael Polanyi |
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Notable ideas
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Existential self-recovery, human person as mindbody, pedagogic irony, critique of self-abstracting tendencies of Modernity |
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Influences
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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. 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 (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: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. His papers are archived at the Yale Divinity School Library.
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.
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