Thomas Kuhn 1922 – 1996

Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions changed how the development of the natural sciences is understood. Trained originally as a physicist at Harvard, he turned to the history of science and produced studies of the Copernican revolution and of the early quantum theory before publishing the great synthetic work that introduced the vocabulary of paradigms, normal science, anomalies, crises, and revolutionary change. He spent most of his career at Princeton and MIT. The Essential Tension and The Road since Structure refined his account in response to four decades of debate.

Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of an industrial engineer. He took bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees at Harvard, originally in physics, with a doctorate in 1949 on the molecular physics of cohesion, before being drawn during James Bryant Conant's general-education course on the history of science into the discipline that would occupy the rest of his career.

He taught at Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, and from 1979 to his retirement at MIT. His major works are The Copernican Revolution (1957), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, with the famous Postscript in 1969), the Sources for History of Quantum Physics (with John Heilbron and others), Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (1978), the essays of The Essential Tension (1977), and the unfinished posthumous manuscript on the philosophical implications of the incommensurability of theories.

Kuhn's account of normal science, paradigms, scientific revolutions, and the incommensurability of successive paradigms transformed the philosophy and history of science and, indeed, the language of educated discussion: 'paradigm shift' became one of the few philosophical phrases of the late twentieth century to enter ordinary speech. He died at Cambridge, Massachusetts in June 1996.