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Born
he became one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential -
Graduated Harvard - summa cum laude.
Gained Masters degree in physics - 1946 and his doctorate in 1949, also in physics (concerning an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics) -
Became a professor at University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley Kuhn’s colleagues included Stanley Cavell, who introduced Kuhn to the works of Wittgenstein, and Paul Feyerabend. -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which was published in 1962 in the series “International Encyclopedia of Unified Science”,
central idea of this extraordinarily influential—and controversial—book is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’. The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution -
Left Berkeley to take up the position of M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University.
In the following year an important event took place; One of the key events of the Colloquium was intended to be a debate between Kuhn and Feyerabend, with Feyerabend promoting the critical rationalism that he shared with Popper. The same year the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published, including an important postscript in which Kuhn clarified his notion of paradigm -
Named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT
Kuhn continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s to work on a variety of topics in both history and philosophy of science, including the development of the concept of incommensurability, and at the time of his death in 1996 he was working on a second philosophical monograph dealing with, among other matters, an evolutionary conception of scientific change and concept acquisition in developmental psychology -
Death and Contrubutions
Kuhn’s contrasting view is that we judge the quality of a theory by comparing it to a paradigmatic theory. They are not permanent, since the paradigm may change in a scientific revolution. For example, to many in the seventeenth century, Newton’s account of gravitation, when compared, to Ptolemy’s explanation of the motion of the planets Comparison between theories straightforward, since the standards of evaluation are themselves subject to change -
Works Cited
Thomas Kuhn, edited by Thomas Nickles, Cambridge University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=217812. 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/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL7PA51Qs8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiNm5Ec-GuE -
Thomas Kuhn: His Core Idea
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Feyerabend and Kuhn