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Thomas Kuhn is Born
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA into an affluent family. His parents called him Tom. Tom’s father, Samuel Louis Kuhn, was a Cincinnati-born industrial engineer and investment consultant. A graduate of Harvard and MIT, he had fought in World War 1. Tom’s mother, Minette Kuhn, came from a wealthy New York family. A graduate of Vassar College, she wrote unpaid articles for progressive organizations, worked as a freelance editor, and was a patron of the arts. -
School at Harvard
He obtained his BS degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, where he also obtained MS and PhD degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively. He stated in his book The Structure of Science that his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history and philosophy of science. He later taught a course in the history of science at Harvard from 1948 until 1956. -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
In his book, Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called paradigm shifts, in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by normal science, when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving". Last is the Scientific revolution which brings a shift in the paradigm. -
Thomas Kuhn Dies
In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991.In 1994 Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 1996.
