Thomas Kuhn

Kuhn on the Greeks and scientific culture

A striking quotation from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic […]

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Thomas Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* [Objectivity course]

In this unit of the Objectivity course we feature Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he questions whether science is or can be an objective process based upon observational facts that makes progress toward truth. Thomas Kuhn was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a

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Top 10 posts of 2020

10. SoHo debate quotes: Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lentricchia. Follow-up to my debate with Thaddeus Russell. 9. Frightened Children Won’t Solve the World’s Problems. With link to my Wall Street Journal article, “Global Problems Are Too Big for Little Kids.” 8. Libertarian Social Justice? Hicks and Horwitz. At Friedman 8 conference. 7. “The Stain of Slavery”

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Thomas Kuhn’s De-Structuring Science [Open College podcast]

Episode 37 in my Open College with Dr. Stephen Hicks podcast series. Why is Thomas Kuhn so frequently cited by postmodernists and other skeptics? Kuhn was professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a classic in the history and philosophy of science. Still relevant to our philosophical and

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Errol Morris asks, “Was Thomas Kuhn Evil?”

Good question about a philosopher’s beliefs, character, and the connections between them. John Horgan reviews Morris’s memoir-and-critique of Kuhn’s proto-postmodernism. I discuss Kuhn’s impact on first-generation postmodernism in Explaining Postmodernism, noting first how in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn concludes that metaphysical subjective relativism is true (if we can use that word): “the proponents

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Kuhn on the Greeks’ unique creation of scientific culture

Sparked by some recent conversation, here again is a striking quotation from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own.

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Thomas Kuhn in Explaining Postmodernism

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues for metaphysical subjective relativism: “the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.” In part, this is because scientists are not educated so much as brainwashed: “the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character in Orwell’s 1984, the victim of

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