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Birth of Thomas Khun
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His younger brother Roger was born three years later. Tom’s father, Samuel Louis Kuhn, was a graduate of Harvard and MIT, he had fought in World War 1 was a industrial engineer and investment consultant. Tom’s mother, Minette Kuhn, came from a wealthy New York family. A graduate of Vassar College, she wrote unpaid articles for progressive organizations, worked as a freelance editor. -
Off to Harvard
Kuhn entered Harvard University in 1940 and obtained his bachelor's degree in physics after three years in 1943, his master's in 1946 and Ph.D. in 1949. -
Fellowship
While still working on his doctorate, Kuhn embarked on a three-year program as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He focused entirely on developing his ideas as a science historian and philosopher. At the end of his fellowship, Harvard appointed Kuhn as an instructor, teaching general courses. A year later, he was promoted to assistant professor. He began giving an undergraduate History of Science course looking at the development of mechanics from Aristotle to Newton. -
The Copernican Revolution
Kuhn published his first book in 1957. He scrutinized Nicolaus Copernicus’s famous book De revolutionibus with its bold claim that the earth orbits the sun. He claimed, with some justification, that Copernicus’s model was no more accurate and no simpler in its portrayal of heavenly bodies than the previous system devised by Claudius Ptolemy. Kuhn believed Copernicus’s model was ultimately preferred because it was more pleasing to its audience. -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Kuhn began this book by declaring that there should be a role for history in theory of science. He introduces the term "paradigm shift" The change of framework was the paradigm shift. Next, Kuhn introduced his notion of “normal science” After a paradigm shift has taken place, Kuhn said, scientists can begin building up facts again, perhaps studying different problems and searching for facts in different places suggested by the new paradigm. -
Additional works
The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays are three additional works Kuhn published. almost all of Kuhn's work after it consisted of further discussions and defenses of things he had written, responses to critics, and some modifications of positions he had taken. -
MIT
In 1979, he became Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) -
Death of Tom
Thomas Kuhn died, age 73, of cancer on June 17, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had been suffering from throat and lung cancer for two years.