Short description:

This new biography of Thomas S. Kuhn pays attention to the continuous development of his ideas. Mayoral provides a comprehensive overview of Kuhn's life and work. The book explores how Kuhn’s theory develops from its beginnings at Harvard University in the early 1950s through the early 1990s at the MIT and also describes Kuhn's parallel lifetime. Between those decades (1950s and 1990s), Kuhn went through different academic institutions, obtained a high status as a public intellectual, and shifted from the history of science to the philosophy of science (and back) as his main research target. All of this left a trace in his philosophical view of science, enriching and changing it since his early training as the theoretical physicist. In this book, Kuhn is considered as an intellectual in evolution, and his contributions are assessed against the backdrop of the different contexts that he traversed. Therefore, there shall not be a static figure of this intellectual, as there shall not be a static figure of the surrounding intellectual contexts, either. At the same time, however, this book is planned so that each chapter provides the reader with a picture of a significant period in Kuhn’s development and the main ideas that can be observed in it.

The book is useful for upper undergraduates in philosophy, especially in philosophy of science, in general history and history of science, in the social sciences and other fields of humanities, and for scientifically trained individuals interested in this author. Kuhn scholars shall find this book useful for their studies on Kuhn insofar as new unpublished documents are employed, new facts about Kuhn’s life are provided, and a full interpretation of Kuhn’s evolving system of philosophy of science is built and discussed.

Long description:

This new biography of Thomas S. Kuhn pays attention to the continuous development of his ideas. Mayoral provides a comprehensive overview of Kuhn's life and work. The book explores how Kuhn’s theory develops from its beginnings at Harvard University in the early 1950s through the early 1990s at the MIT and also describes Kuhn's parallel lifetime. Between those decades (1950s and 1990s), Kuhn went through different academic institutions, obtained a high status as a public intellectual, and shifted from the history of science to the philosophy of science (and back) as his main research target. All of this left a trace in his philosophical view of science, enriching and changing it since his early training as the theoretical physicist. In this book, Kuhn is considered as an intellectual in evolution, and his contributions are assessed against the backdrop of the different contexts that he traversed. Therefore, there shall not be a static figure of this intellectual, as there shall not be a static figure of the surrounding intellectual contexts, either. At the same time, however, this book is planned so that each chapter provides the reader with a picture of a significant period in Kuhn’s development and the main ideas that can be observed in it.

The book is useful for upper undergraduates in philosophy, especially in philosophy of science, in general history and history of science, in the social sciences and other fields of humanities, and for scientifically trained individuals interested in this author. Kuhn scholars shall find this book useful for their studies on Kuhn insofar as new unpublished documents are employed, new facts about Kuhn’s life are provided, and a full interpretation of Kuhn’s evolving system of philosophy of science is built and discussed.

Table of Contents:

Family, Education, and Early Philosophy.- James Bryant Conant and Harvard University.- Kuhn’s First Philosophy of Science: The Lowell Lectures.- The History and the Sociology of Science.- The Construction of Structure.