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"[2] 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.

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.

[7] 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.

[7] 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.

[10] 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.

[15] 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.

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.

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 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.

[19] 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.

[20] 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".

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 2014 thirty-three of his former students and other admirers gathered at the Yale Divinity School for a symposium honoring his life and work, called "The Primacy of Persons: The Intellectual Legacy of William H. Poteat" and sponsored by the Polanyi Society.

That how of intellection, the how of one's personal relation to the object of thought—in other words, the underlying relationship between knower and known—is predominantly tacit, difficult to articulate, and therefore not something on which one can easily reflect, which causes it to be all the more potentially consequential in the process of knowing.

Thus the Critical mode by devaluing, and becoming oblivious to, the intimate connections between how and what, and generally to the underlying tacit relationship between knower and known, leaves in its place a colorless, purposeless, meaningless world of objects subject to unchecked manipulation.

In Poteat's own words, it is the perennial temptation of critical thought to demand total explicitness in all things, to bring all background into foreground, to dissolve the tension between the focal and the subsidiary by making everything focal, to dilute the temporal and intentional thickness of perception, to dehistoricize thought ... to lighten every shadowy place, to dig up and aerate the roots of our being, to make all interiors exterior, to unsituate all reflection from time and space, to disincarnate mind, to define knowledge as that which can be grasped by thought in an absolutely lucid 'moment' without temporal extension, to flatten out all epistemic hierarchy, to homogenize all logical heterogeneity[27]Poteat demonstrated to his students that making the shift to a Post-Critical mode of thinking requires escaping from the largely subconscious and profoundly self-alienating abstractedness of the Critical mode—the "default mode" of Modernity.

In place of hypercritical suspicion as the driving, central motive of thought, one comes to share in a Post-Critical sensibility, centered on the recovery of a passionate methodological faith in the tacit intimations of reality, a truth in common, that reveals itself inexhaustibly.

[29] Poteat accomplished this pedagogical feat through a combination of an ironic stance, whereby he deliberately made impossible any simple, straightforward taking in of what he might have to convey, and a skillful use of the Socratic Method to question, draw out, and bring to light the implications of his students' own thoughts and ideas on the text under consideration and the issues it raised.

"[31] Later in his life he described the principal focus of this teaching effort in the following words: [It was] a sustained critical colloquy with three generations of graduate students set among a half-dozen or so "canonical" volumes in the context of our mutual search for the imagination's way out of what Walker Percy has called the "old modern age."

Like any parasite, this essentially polemical convivium has battened on its host, hoping, not to weaken and eventually bring down, but, rather, modestly to change the universities in which it was formed and by whose sufferance it has lived.

: An Intellectual (But Personal) Autobiography" in the Polanyi Society Journal Tradition and Discovery:[35] Ricoeur's Freud and Philosophy... is a ponderous tome, and it was the assigned reading for the first class I had with Poteat.

It was only because I had struggled ... with Poteat and my fellow students that I could later see the same pattern in [other works].Although Poteat drew heavily on that small core of texts for his teaching methodology, particularly at Duke, his teaching ranged over a very wide scope to incorporate most aspects of the history of Western culture, Renaissance visual art, tragedy, ancient Greek culture, the interaction between Greek and Hebrew metaphysics, existentialism, ordinary language philosophy, theory of myth and symbol, religious language, philosophy of science, phenomenology, philosophical psychology, and philosophical anthropology.

It is the center from which all our stretching forth toward the world commences, beginning: in my mother’s womb, within which her beating heart rhythmically pumps the blood of life through my foetal body, forming itself toward my primal initiation into the very foundation of my first and most primitive cosmos.

[42]The ground of the human notions of order, measure, “connectedness,” of “hanging together” (that is, logic) lies in this prelingual level of awareness, which is inescapably ours, which never leaves us, and from which all the articulations of higher thought are educed.

it is clear that if the tonic mindbody is the omnipresent and inalienable matrix within which all our acts of meaning-discernment are conceived and brought to term, if, that is to say, the new picture of ourselves as beings in the world actively engaged in asking, seeking, finding, and affirming clearly situates us in the moil and ruck of the world’s temporal thickness, marinating there in our own carnal juices, then our rationality can only appear here, inextricably consanguine with our most primitive sentience, motility, and orientation.

[43] Another of Poteat's significant ideas, touched on in this last quotation, in support of which Poteat's Polanyian Meditations: In Search of a Post-Critical Logic is dedicated, is that all explicitly formal modes of rationality—including logic, mathematics, geometry, and computer processing—along with all of the wonderfully useful things with which they endow us in our technocratic world—are ultimately rooted and grounded in the pre-reflectively lived flesh of our mindbodies in the world—not in any sense as a compromise to their validity but as the enabling power of their meaning and coherence.

To recognize and embrace this shift, Poteat realized that it requires not only an intellectual breakthrough but an existential transformation: from a detached, withdrawn, and withheld faith and passion to a pouring forth of one's personal presence, empathy, and creative powers, actively reaching out to apprehend and indwell intimations of truth and yet undisclosed realities in whatever field of inquiry.

Poteat recognized in Merleau-Ponty's practice of existential phenomenology a means of appropriating existentially Edmund Husserl’s shift from what Husserl called "the Natural Standpoint" (a third-person abstractive account of the supposedly objective world of material objects, our body supposedly being one of them) to a confident embracing of the concrete, pre-reflective "Lifeworld" that we know only from within our lived body.

Existential phenomenology, for Merleau-Ponty, is the way that the wonders of the Lifeworld can be adequately described and understood as more fundamental than any abstract conceptions deriving from the Natural Standpoint.

Rather than pursuing this methodology systematically, as some phenomenologists have attempted to do, in Poteat's teaching and writing he describes and brings to our notice normally tacit aspects of our mindbodily being in the world of which we are usually not reflectively aware or able to articulate.