Synopsis
Divided into three parts, this is a record of the new direction the author was taking during the last two decades of his life. The first part of the book consists of essays in which he refines the basic concepts set forth in his novel Structure--paradigm shifts, incommensurability, and the nature of scientific progress. In the second part, he replies to many of the criticisms of his earlier work. And the third part of the volume is the transcript of a biographical interview with him conducted in Athens in 1995, not quite a year before his death. Here, the usually reticent author discusses his own intellectual development--his upbringing and thoughts about his education, the influence of his training as a physicist, his war work, his reelations with ihs colleagues, the responses to Structure--and his struggle to define his philosophical position before and after that work. (Midwest).
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Wait—I know you just finished his later work, but if you haven't read the original 1962 *Structure* that sparked decades of debate, this is essential. Kuhn himself spends much of *The Road Since* wrestling with how his ideas were misread, so seeing the source material will let you understand exactly where the paradigm-shift concept came from and why philosophers have been arguing about it ever since.
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The Savage Mind
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View bookAbout Thomas S. Kuhn
T
Thomas S. Kuhn
1922–1996
American historian, physicist and philosopher
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