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Birth of Thomas Kuhn
On July 18th, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born. His younger brother Roger was born three years later. His father, Samuel Louis Kuhn, was an industrial engineer,
who graduated from both Harvard and MIT, and fought in World War 1. Thomas' mother was Minette Kuhn, who was a graduate of Vassar College and heir to a wealthy New York family. -
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Lincoln School
From kindergarten through fifth grade, he was instructed at Lincoln School, a private dynamic school in Manhattan, which focused on free intuition instead of learning realities and subjects. The family then moved 40 miles north to the humble community of Croton-on-Hudson where he went to a private dynamic school, Hessian Hills School. -
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DEGREE IN PHYSICS
He obtained his SB degree in physics from Harvard College in 1943, where he also obtained SM and PhD degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949.He later taught a course in the history of science at Harvard from 1948 until 1956. -
Kuhn's first Book
While teaching at Harvard, Thomas Kuhn taught undergraduate courses that dug into Aristotle's work. He quickly became baffled from Aristotle's work. This caused Kuhn to concentrate on the history of science, which led up to his first book being published, "The Copernican Revolution". Cosmos Magazine stated that The Copernican Revolution "examines the development of the heliocentric theory of the solar system during the Renaissance." -
Professor Promotion
After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy and history department, being named Professor of the History of science in 1961. Berkeley promoted Kuhn to a full professor of History of Science. This actually infuriated him, because he wanted to be a professor of Philosophy. In the end, however, he agreed to accept the position in History. -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was first published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, then as a book by University of Chicago Press in 1962. In 1969, Kuhn added a postscript to the book in which he replied to responses to the first edition. A 50th Anniversary Edition was published by the University of Chicago Press in April 2012. In this book Kuhn writes about the history of science. https://youtu.be/UH_kXuhRIoQ -
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Princeton Teaching
Kuhn taught at Princeton University. -
ESSAYS
Kuhn’s later works were a collection of essays, The Essential Tension (1977), The technical study Black-Body Theory, and The Quantum Discontinuity (1978)." -
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MIT Teaching
Kuhn taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). -
The Death of Thomas Kuhn
On June 17, 1996, Thomas Kuhn died at the age of 73. He passed in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For the previous two years he had been very sick and battling cancer in his bronchial tubes and throat.
