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Birth
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in a liberal progressive household. His parents were Samuel, a Harvard and MIT trained engineer, and Minette, "a liberally educated person who came from an affluent family" (Marcum), who was also a freelance editor and patron of the arts (“Thomas Samuel Kuhn”). -
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Early Challenges Surpassed
From an early age, he recalled some struggles with learning, recalling that in the second grade, "he was unable to read proficiently, much to the consternation of his parents" (Marcum). He ultimately graduated high school third out of a class of 105. -
Following his Father's Footsteps
Upon graduating High School, Kuhn enrolled in Harvard College, as had his father and uncle. While initially unable to decide between pursuing a degree in math or physics, he eventually settled on the latter (Marcum). Interestingly, he recalls scoring a "C" on his first physics exam. Upon following his professor's advice to practice more problems, he ended his freshman year with a grade of "A" (“Thomas Samuel Kuhn”). -
Graduation from Harvard
Having sped up his degree by attending summer classes, Kuhn graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor of Science in Physics summa cum laude (Bird). -
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Straight to Work Out of College
Kuhn went straight to work after graduating, working in Radio Research Laboratory located in Harvard’s biology building. Here, his work consisted of countering enemy radar. In this capacity, he also travelled to the United Kingdom, France, and Germany (Marcum). -
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Masters and Doctorate
in 1945, Kuhn returned to Harvard. As the war abated with the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, Kuhn activated an earlier acceptance into graduate school and began studies in the physics department. Although Kuhn persuaded the department to permit him to take philosophy courses during his first year, dissertation research on theoretical solid-state physics, under the direction of van Vleck. In 1949, Harvard awarded Kuhn a doctorate in physics. (Marcum) -
Transformation into a Philosopher of Science
Midway through his doctorate program, Kuhn recalls the moment his interest in the philosophy of science piqued. He struggled to understand Aristotle’s idea of motion in Physics because, he was assuming Newton's categories of motion (Marcum). He realized that when using categories contemporary to Aristotle's time, he was able to understand his work properly, undistorted by knowledge of subsequent science (Bird). -
Copernican Revolution
After honing his ambitions in history, science, and philosophy, Kuhn publishes Copernican Revolution. In it, he concluded that "Scientific progress... is not [a] linear process, as championed by traditional philosophers of science. Rather, it is the repeated destruction and replacement of scientific theories" (Marcum). The book would cost him tenure at Harvard, but opened the door for a dual appointment to both the history and philosophy departments at the University of California - Berkeley. -
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Interdisciplinary Enlightenment
By 1958, UC Berkeley granted Kuhn tenure, and he also initiated a fellowship with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. "What struck Kuhn about the relationships among behavioral and social scientists was their inability to agree on the fundamental problems and practices of their discipline... [with] natural scientists... there is an agreement over fundamentals. This difference eventually led Kuhn to formulate the paradigm concept" (Marcum). -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Kuhn publishes The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a radical reimagination of the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Herein, he presents the concept of the Paradigm Shift. He argued that science is not the linear accumulation of facts, but rather paradigms that the scientific community agreed on, and changed only through accumulation of anomalies to the point of crisis, forcing a shift to a new paradigm through consensus (Marcum). -
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Life after Structure
In 1964, Kuhn accepted a professorship at Princeton University, where he would debate John Watkins in a session chaired by Karl Popper in 1965. The discussion "helped illuminate the significance of Kuhn’s approach," furthering his profile among philosophers (Bird). 1979 saw him move to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where his work took a linguistic turn and refined his subsequent work on incommensurability. He retired in 1991 (Marcum). -
Death
Thomas S. Kuhn passed away at his home in Cambridge, MA at the age of 73 (MIT News). Up until his death, he had continued work in both history and the philosophy of science, leaving "a second philosophical monograph dealing with, among other matters, an evolutionary conception of scientific change and concept acquisition in developmental psychology" unfinished (Bird).