Thomas Kuhn – Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Atlas Intellectuals]

2 Comments / Atlas Intellectuals, Education, Philosophy, Science / Fermin Elizalde

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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Harris interview on science, progress, and liberal education

Leave a Comment / Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

Bradford Harris is a Ph.D. from Stanford University in History of Science and Technology. Our 59-minute conversation ranges over these topics: Modern and Postmodern Thomas Kuhn and paradigms. Science as progress by self-correcting trial and error. Postmodernism versus liberal democracy? Richard Rorty’s ethnocentric predicament. The new tribalism. Is the psychology more important than the philosophy?

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

1 Comment / Philosophy, Science / Stephen Hicks

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?”

Leave a Comment / Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

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

2 Comments / Philosophy, Science / Stephen Hicks

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

1 Comment / Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

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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The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [EP audiobook]

Leave a Comment / History of Philosophy, Literature, Philosophy of History / Stephen Hicks

This is the third chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes] Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition [mp3] [YouTube] Setting aside reason and logic [mp3] [YouTube] Emotions as revelatory [mp3] [YouTube] Heidegger and postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]

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