Two sources of Michael Polanyi`s prototypal notion of incommensurability: Evans-Pritchard on Azande witchcraft and St Augustine on conversion

Michael Polanyi argues in Personal Knowledge (1958) that conceptual frameworks involved in major scientific controversies are separated by a `logical gap'. Such frameworks, according to Polanyi (1958: 151), are logically disconnected: their protagonists think differently, use different languages and occupy different worlds. Relinquishing one framework and adopting another, Polanyi's scientist undergoes a `conversion' to a new `faith'. Polanyi, in other words, presaged Kuhn and Feyerabend's concept of incommensurability. To what influences was Polanyi subject as he developed his concept of the logical gap? The answer, as unfolded in this article, is twofold: Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande and the Confessions of St Augustine.

Mother of Pearl (in memorium Liz Evans, 1971-2014)

This artwork is a paitning which was accepted for exhibition in the Art for Wellbeing 2016 Queenscliff Vic., which was curated by the CENTRE FOR THEOLOGY & MINISTRY, Parkville. The Exhibition ran from 29 April to 27 May 2016.

Walker Evans: documentary detachment, narrative sequences and telling juxtapositions

This paper will re-examine the long established position of Evans as the quintessential detached documentary style photographer. I propose that is only part of the story. Evans was the inventor of the clinically detached and knowing ‘documentary style’. However, we will see that his magazine portfolios and his portfolios in book form; function quite differently. I will argue they employ a surprisingly engaged pictorial narrative form that echoes his personal scrapbook arrangements of magazine cuttings, and international magazine tropes of the time. Evans arranges his otherwise detached documents in satirical juxtapositions and telling sequences. I will argue that the Vitruvius of the vernacular is after all, also an engaged and engaging storyteller.