Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Thomas S. Kuhn, historian and philosopher of science, was born on 18 July 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and died 17 June 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He entered Harvard in 1939 and remained there until 1956, receiving a Ph.D. in physics in 1949. For three years he was a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and then began teaching in James Bryant Conant's recently established General Education Program. Conant used a historical approach to communicate the nature of science to undergraduates; working with Conant helped shift Kuhn's interests from physics to the history of science. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at Berkeley for 9 years, at Princeton for 15, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 12. He retired from teaching in 1991. After publishing two articles in the Physical Review and one in the Quarterly of Applied Mathematics , in 1951 Kuhn began publishing in Isis. the journal of the history of science edited by George Sarton. In 1957 his first book. The Copernican Revolution. appeared. Following up on the work of Alexandre Koyré and others, this book spelled out in detail the gradual breakdown of attempts to reconcile Aristotelian ways of describing physical processes, and Aristotelian ways of thinking about the methods and function of scientific inquiry, with Copernican astronomy and Galilean mechanics. (See galileo .) It made clear that the ... log in or subscribe to read full text