Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is one of the most influential philosophers of science in the 20th century. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most frequently cited academic books of all time. Kuhn’s work in the philosophy of science marked not only a departure from several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that better reflects the history of science.
His account of the development of science argued that science enjoyed a period of steady growth interrupted by revision revolutions. To this thesis, Kuhn added the controversial ‘incommensurability thesis’, which holds that theories from different periods have difficulty being compared.
Thomas Kuhn’s academic life began in the field of physics. He began his academic career in the history of science, and later moved on to the philosophy of science. He has remained interested in the history of physics throughout his career. He graduated from Harvard with the highest honors in 1943. After spending the war years working on radar at Harvard, he moved to Europe to continue his research. He earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively, all in the field of quantum mechanics. Kuhn was elected to the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is composed of other highly respected scholars.
From this time until 1956, Kuhn taught science classes to undergraduate humanities students as part of a general science education curriculum developed by Harvard President James B. Conant. This course centers on historical case studies, Kuhn’s first opportunity to study historical scientific texts.
Aristotle’s work initially baffled him, but then he suddenly became able to understand it properly, free of any preconceived notions about later scientific discoveries. This led Kuhn to focus on the history of science, and eventually he was appointed an assistant professor in general education and the history of science. During this time, his work focused on eighteenth century mathematics and the early history of thermodynamics. Kuhn then turned to the history of astronomy and in 1957 published his first book, The Copernican Revolution.
In 1961, Kuhn became a full professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he had previously worked as a professor of history of science. This helped him develop an interest in the philosophy of science.
In 1964, Kuhn left Berkeley to take up the position of a philosophy professor at Princeton University. The following year saw an important event that helped further promote Kuhn’s profile among philosophers. An international colloquium on the philosophy of science was held at Bedford College in London.
In the same year that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition was published, including an important postscript by Kuhn clarifying his notion of paradigm, he said that a paradigm is a way of thinking that is shared by a group of scientists.
A collection of essays on the philosophy and history of science was published in 1977 with the title “The Essential Tension.” This title comes from one of Kuhn’s earliest essays, in which he highlights the role of tradition in science. In the next year, he published his second historical monograph, Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, which focuses on the early history of quantum mechanics.
Kuhn continued to work on a variety of topics in both history and philosophy of science throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including the development of the concept of incommensurability, and he was still working on a second philosophical monograph at the time of his death in 1996.
