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Thomas kuhn paradigm shift

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Thomas Kuhn

Overview

Authors:
  1. Juan V. Mayoral

    1. Unidad Predepartamental de Filosofía, Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

  • Offers the first comprehensive intellectual biography of Thomas S. Kuhn
  • Examines Kuhn's philosophy of science against the backdrop of its historical context
  • Explores Kuhn's philosophy of science

About this book

This new biography of Thomas S. Kuhn pays attention to the continuous development of his ideas. Mayoral provides a comprehensive overview of Kuhn's life and work. The book explores how Kuhn’s theory develops from its beginnings at Harvard University in the early 1950s through the early 1990s at the MIT and also describes Kuhn's parallel lifetime. Between those decades (1950s and 1990s), Kuhn went through different academic institutions, obtained a high status as a public intellectual, and shifted from the history of science to the philosophy of science (and back) as his main research target. All of this left a trace in his philosophical view of science, enriching and changing it sinc

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Thomas S. Kuhn
by
K. Brad Wray
  • LAST REVIEWED: 29 November 2018
  • LAST MODIFIED: 29 November 2018
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0202

  • Kuhn, Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957.

    Provides a history of astronomy from ancient times to Newton’s synthesis of Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion, and Galileo’s work on the physics of free-falling bodies. Published before Kuhn developed the account of scientific change presented in Structure. Noticeably missing from this book is any reference to paradigms.

  • Kuhn, Thomas S. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

    Part 1 contains some historical studies as well as some of Kuhn’s papers on the relationship between history of science and philosophy of science. Part 2 contains a series of philosophical papers, including “The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research?” (pp. 22

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    Thomas Kuhn

    1. Life and Career

    Thomas Kuhn’s academic life started in physics. He then switched to history of science, and as his career developed he moved over to philosophy of science, although retaining a strong interest in the history of physics. In 1943, he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude. Thereafter he spent the remainder of the war years in research related to radar at Harvard and then in Europe. He gained his master’s degree in physics in 1946, and his doctorate in 1949, also in physics (concerning an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics). Kuhn was elected to the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard, another of whose members was W. V. Quine. At this time, and until 1956, Kuhn taught a class in science for undergraduates in the humanities, as part of the General Education in Science curriculum, developed by James B. Conant, the President of Harvard. This course was centred around historical case studies, and this was Kuhn’s first opportunity to study historical scientific texts in detail. His initial bewilderment on readi

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