Kuhn, Thomas(1922–1996)
Educated at Harvard University (SB, 1943; PhD in physics, 1949), Thomas Kuhn taught at Harvard (1951–1956), University of California, Berkeley (1956–1964), Princeton University (1964–1979), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979–1991). His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962 (2nd. ed., 1970), continues to stimulate discussion among historians and philosophers of science even as its concepts of "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" have been adopted by a great diversity of writers, often at some remove from their source in Kuhn's book.
Conceptual Schemes, Paradigms, and Normal Science
At Harvard Kuhn became the protégé of its president, James B. Conant, to whom he dedicated the first edition of Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Conant's concept of "conceptual scheme," applied especially to the chemical revolution's phlogiston and oxygen theories, reappeared in Kuhn's first book, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957), and was one of the principal sources of Kuhn's all-important paradigm concept. His evolving understanding of that concept also reflected a pivotal experience in 1947, in which he suddenly appreciated that Aristotle could not properly be understood from the perspective of post-Galilean physics, but only from within Aristotle's own context of problems, concepts, and assumptions.
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