Description
The influence of Thomas Kuhn (1922 -1996) on the history and philosophy of science has been truly enormous. In 1962, Kuhn's famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, helped to inaugurate a revolution - the historiographic revolution - in the latter half of the twentieth century, providing a new understanding of science in which 'paradigm shifts' (scientific revolutions) are punctuated with periods of stasis (normal science). Kuhn's revolution not only had a huge impact on the history and philosophy of science but on other disciplines as well, including sociology, education, economics, theology, and even science policy. James A. Marcum's book focuses on the following questions: What exactly was Kuhn's historiographic revolution? How did it come about? Why did it have the impact it did? What, if any, will its future impact be for both academia and society? At the heart of the answers to these questions is the person of Kuhn himself, i.e., his personality, his pedagogical style, his institutional and social commitments, and the intellectual and social context in which he practiced his trade.
Drawing on the rich archival sources at MIT, and engaging fully with current scholarship on Kuhn, Marcum's is the first book to show in detail how Kuhn's influence transcended the boundaries of the history and philosophy of science community to reach many others - sociologists, economists, theologians, political scientists, educators, and even policy makers and politicians.
Table of Contents
Part I: Context of Kuhn's life and work
1. Background to Kuhn's work.
2. Kuhn's intellectual biography and its context.
Part II: Kuhn's history/philosophy of science
3. Kuhn's work up to and including The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
4. Reactions to Structure and Kuhn's responses.
Part III: Appropriation of Kuhn's work
5. Non-historians/philosophers.
6. Kuhn's revolution and its future.
Bibliography
Index
Author(s)
James A. Marcum, James Marcum teaches philosophy at Baylor University, USA. He has doctorates in philosophy and physiology, and was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, where he studied philosophy of science with Kuhn. He was also an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
Reviews
“Marcum (Baylor Univ.) offers a welcome addition to the
vast literature on Thomas Kuhn and his revolutionary image of science. The
author’s intention is to reconstruct ‘the development of Kuhn’s historical
philosophy of science’ - indeed, to offer a Kuhnian perspective on Kuhn’s work,
focusing on the process of formation of the ideas rather than on a static
formulation of the product… Marcum traces Kuhn’s essential contributions to the
historiographic revolution in the latter half of the 20th century,
and reflects on the influence Kuhn has had and will continue to have on society
and on the history of philosophy and science…The bibliography includes an
exhaustive list of Kuhn’s publications and is fairly comprehensive of the major
literature discussing his works. This is likely the best all-around portrayal
of Kuhn.”- H.C. Byerly, Choice, April
2006,
,
mention- Book News, February 2006,