1. K UHN M EN OF I NFLUENCE TOK MAX SAMAROO Cristina Robinson

2. E ARLY LIFE Born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio He obtained his B.S. Degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, and M.S and Ph.D degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively. He stated in the first few pages of the preface to the second edition of, The structure of Scientific Revolutions, 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.

3. E ARLY LIFE Thomas Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard from 1948 until 1956. After leaving Harvard University, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley in both the philosophy and history department. At Berkeley, he wrote and published his best and most influential work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in 1962.

4. E ARLY L IFE His initial bewilderment on reading the scientific work of Aristotle was a formative experience, followed as it was by a more or less sudden ability to understand Aristotle properly, undistorted by knowledge of subsequent science. This led Kuhn to concentrate on history of science and in due course he was appointed to an assistant professorship in general education and the history of science. During this period his work focused on eighteenth century matter theory and the early history of thermodynamics. Kuhn then turned to the history of astronomy, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution.

5. W ORKS BY K UHN The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays (1970- 1993) Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (1894-1912) The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957)

6. T HE S TRUCTURE OF S CIENTIFIC R EVOLUTIONS Was an analysis of the history of science. The central idea was that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a 'paradigm.' The function of a paradigm was to provide puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solutions. Kuhn argued that science is not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge.

7. T HE S TRUCTURE OF R EVOLUTIONS According to Kuhn the development of a science is not uniform but has alternating normal and revolutionary phases. According to Kuhn, scientific revolutions involve a revision to existing scientific belief or practice. Kuhn believed that science improves by allowing its theories to evolve in response to puzzles, and progress is measured by its success in solving those puzzles; it is not measured by its progress towards to an ideal true theory.

8. F AMOUS Q UOTES “It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.” “Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.” “Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.” “The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.”

9. M ETAPHORS “Finding facts, matching facts with theory, and articulating theory adds to the scope and precision with which a paradigm can be applied.”

10. W HY SHOULD WE LISTEN TO K UHN ? He was a Harvard summa cum laude graduate. His, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is one of the most cited academic books of all time. His contribution to the philosophy science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it much closer to the history of science. His account of the development of science held that science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions, to which he added the controversial ‘incommensurability thesis’, that theories from differing periods suffer from certain deep kinds of failure of comparability.