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Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His mother was Minette Stroock Kuhn and his father was Samuel L. Kuhn
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Kuhn had interest in many fields, physics, history of science, philosophy of science, as well as the history of physics. In 1943, he graduated from Harvard but due to WWII taking place at the time he remained at Harvard through the remainder of the war researching radar.
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In 1946 he received his masters degree in physics
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In 1949 he received his doctorate in physics concerning an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics and was made a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard.
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After the war was over Kuhn began teaching science in the humanities focused on case studies up until 1956. This was his first look into detailed historical scientific text which gave him a better true understanding of Aristotle's teachings free from the bias of those who read it before him.
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Kuhn began teaching history of science and was appointed to an assistant professorship. He began to focus on matter theory and the history of thermodynamics, followed by the history of astronomy. This leasd to the publication of his first book, The Copernican Revolution in 1957
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After moving to the University of Berkley in 1956 to teach the history of science as a member of the philosophy department he became a full professor in 1961.
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While at Berkeley Kuhn discussed his draft of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions with on of his collogues Paul Freyerabend. Kuhn went on to publish in 1962 as part of the series "International Encyclopedia of United States". which was edited by Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. The central idea of this influential—and controversial—book is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’.
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In 1964 Kuhn left Berkeley to become the Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University.
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The year following his move to Princeton, Kuhn attended an International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science was held at Bedford College, London. The debate Kuhn took part in Was between himself and John Watkin, to which Popper and also Margaret Masterman and Stephen Toulmin contributed, compared and contrasted the viewpoints of Kuhn and Popper and thereby helped illuminate the significance of Kuhn’s approach.
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In 1970 the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published, including an important postscript in which Kuhn clarified his notion of paradigm. This was in part in response to Masterman’s (1970) criticism that Kuhn had used ‘paradigm’ in a wide variety of ways; in addition, Kuhn felt that critics had failed to appreciate the emphasis he placed upon the idea of a paradigm as an exemplar or model of puzzle-solving.
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A collection of Kuhn’s essays in the philosophy and history of science was published in 1977, with the title The Essential Tension taken from one of Kuhn’s earliest essays in which he emphasizes the importance of tradition in science.
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The following year saw the publication of his second historical monograph Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, concerning the early history of quantum mechanics.
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In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT.
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At the time of his death in 1996 he was working on a second philosophical monograph dealing with, among other matters, an evolutionary conception of scientific change and concept acquisition in developmental psychology.
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Bibliography Thomas Kuhn
First published Fri Aug 13, 2004; substantive revision Wed Oct 31, 2018
Bird, Alexander, "Thomas Kuhn", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/thomas-kuhn/. -
Books by Thomas Kuhn
1957, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.
1962/1970a, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1970, 2nd edition, with postscript).
1978, Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, Oxford: Clarendon Press (2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press).