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Thomas Samuel Kuhn born July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel Louis Kuhn and Minette Kuhn.
Home. https://www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/. -
Kuhn's education career started in physics, then proceeded to history of science and progressed from there to philosophy to science.
Thomas S. Kuhn. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/kuhn-ts/. -
Thomas graduated from Harvard with a bachelors in physics in 1943, and went on to receive his master's in physics in 1946 and then his doctorate in 1949.
Thomas S. Kuhn. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/kuhn-ts/. -
After working at Harvard as an assistant professor, he turned his focus to eighteenth century matter theory, then onto the history of astronomy. He published his first book, The Copernican Revolution, in 1957.
Bird, A. (2018, October 31). Thomas Kuhn. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/. -
Thomas began teaching at the University of California after accepting a job in the philosophy department, teaching the history of science. His tenure wasn't renewed at Harvard due to the popularity of his book.
Bird, A. (2018, October 31). Thomas Kuhn. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/. -
In 1961, Kuhn and Feyerabend began discussing the draft of Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was soon published in 1962 in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. The main idea of this book was that science is "driven by a paradigm."
Bird, A. (2018, October 31). Thomas Kuhn. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/. -
Thomas Kuhn believed that paradigm were puzzles for scientists to solve and provide essential tools for their solutions. He thought that when a crisis in science happened, it gave scientists a chance to solve the problem and provide a better solution for their crisis to prevent it from happening again.
Bird, A. (2018, October 31). Thomas Kuhn. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/. -
He believed that there were several stages in his revolution:
Normal Science
Model Drift
Model Crisis
Model Revolution
Paradigm Change
Adel, N. (2016, June 30). THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION -Thomas Kuhn. SlideShare. https://www.slideshare.net/nouranadd/the-structure-ofscientific-revolution-thomas-kuhn. -
Kuhn moved to Princeton University and began teaching Philosophy and History of Science
Home. https://www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/. -
Thomas continued his teaching career as he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was the Professor of Philosophy.
Home. https://www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/. -
Thomas Kuhn died of cancer on June 17, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had been suffering from throat and lung cancer for two years.
Home. https://www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/. -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L70T4pQv7P8
(This video was published May 27, 2020. I put the year as 2020 as I wasn't sure what date to use it had many different timelines throughout.)