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Thomas Kuhn

By Maria E Cordova

  • Birth

    Birth
    Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on 18 July 1922. He was to become one of the greatest and most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

  • Education

    Education
    Before Kuhn became a great philosopher he sparked an interest in physics that later continued into the history of science and eventually turned to philosophy. The following is his formal education timeline as a graduate from Harvard, where he accomplished a degree in Physics and graduated as Summa Cum Laude. He continued his education until he got his doctorate in Physics in 1949.

  • Books

    Books
    Kuhn's first published book is called "The Copernican Revolution."
    It followed a list of other published works, with the most famous being "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." The following is a list of some of his other materials.
    1970 - “The Road Since Structure”
    1977 - "The Essential Tension"
    1978 - “Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity"
    2000 - "The Road Since Structure" ed. by James Conant

  • Biggest Achievement

    Biggest Achievement
    Thomas Kuhn made a substantial contribution to philosophy throughout his career and perhaps the most influential and well-known work was his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolution," published in 1962. It was in his book that the idea of paradigm shift and incommensurability was introduced.

  • The Paradigm Shift

    The Paradigm Shift
    His idea of the paradigm shift encompassed 4 stages of development:
    o Phase 1- normal science: well-organized ideas
    o Phase 2- model crisis: conflicting ideas, debate, critical thinking, search for new explanations
    o Phase 3- The Model Revolution: new solutions and ways of thinking emerge in this stage
    o Phase 4- Paradigm Shift: the new way of thinking replaces the old way of thought.

  • Citations

    Citations
    Bird, Alexander, "Thomas Kuhn", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/thomas-kuhn/. Peter Godfrey-Smith. Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. University of Chicago Press, 2003. Thomas, K. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Death

    Death
    Thomas Kuhn died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 17, 1996. He had been battling cancer for a couple of years before he passed away.