Structure: Thomas Kuhn - American Philosopher (July 18, 1922 - June 17, 1996)

Born

Jul 18, 1922

Born on 18 July 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Summa Cum Laude

1943

In 1943 he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, after which he researched radar at Harvard and in Europe until World War II ended. Gaining a master’s degree in 1946 and his doctorate in 1949, both in the field of physics (Alexander).

The Copernican Revolution

1957

Kuhn taught a class in science for undergraduates in the humanities for the General Education in Science curriculum, developed by James B. Conant, the President of Harvard. This course led him to concentrate on history of science and after being appointed to an assistant professorship in general education and the history of science he turned to the history of astronomy. In 1957 his first book "The Copernican Revolution" was published (Alexander).

Professor

1961

Becoming a full professor in 1961 at the University of California at Berkeley in the philosophy department, this enabled his interest in the philosophy of science. Stanley Cavell introduced him to the works of Wittgenstein and Paul Feyerabend with whom he discussed a draft of The Structure of Scientific Resolutions (Alexander).

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

1962

In the series "International Encyclopedia of Unified Science", published in 1962 was Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". The extraordinarily influential, controversial book that drove the development of science, in normal periods to what Kuhn called a 'paradigm' (Alexander).

Structure

1963

Kuhn’s theory on paradigm's was it’s a whole way of doing science, in some particular field; it is claims about the world, methods of gathering and analyzing data, and habits of scientific thought and action. He believed that the revolutions science goes through every now and then occur when one paradigm replaces another (Godfrey-Smith). This short clip helps explain: Link text

Essays and Historic Seconds

1978

A collection of Kuhn's essays in philosophy and history of science were published in 1977, "The Essential Tension". A title taken from one of Kuhn's earliest essays where he emphasized the importance of tradition in science. 1978 brought the publication of his second historical monograph "Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity", which covered the early history of quantum mechanics.

MIT

1983

In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT, where he continued throughout the 1980s and 90's to work on several topics in both history and philosophy of science; including the development of the concept of incommensurability.

Death

Jun 17, 1996

At the time of his death on 17 June 1996, he was working on a second philosophical monograph that dealt with, among other matters, an evolutionally concept of scientific change and concept acquisition in developmental psychology (Alexander).