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Life and Career
Kuhn started his academic life in Physics but switched to the history over science which then developed into the philosophy of science. He graduated from Harvard in 1943, gained his master's degree in physics in 1946 and his doctorate in 1949. He taught a class for undergraduates in humanities as part of the General Education in Science which was his first opportunity to study historical scientific texts in detail which lead to 1957 where he published his first book "The Copernican Revolution" -
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Development of his ideas
Kuhn had rejected a teleological view of science progressing towards the truth and instead has favored a more evolutionary view of scientific progress. A good way to explain that is that while evolution did not lead towards the best kind of organisms it still lead to a more diverse group of organisms that helps us better understand scientific methods and pathways. -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
This second edition paper has an important postscript in which Kuhn was clarifying his notion of what he know as a paradigm. It was important because he thought that critics had failed to appreciate the emphasis he placed on the idea of a paradigm being a puzzle-solving theory. -
Scientific Revolutions
Attached is a video produced by Leiden University on Thomas Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions to help better explain how his work was important to the Philosophy of Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQPsc55zsXA -
Works Cited
Bird, Alexander. “Thomas Kuhn.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 31 Oct. 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/.
