Thomas S. Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn, the son of engineer Samuel L. Kuhn, was born in Cincinnati and raised in between New York City and Croton-on-Hudson. Though he is thought of as a historian and philosopher, he started off his career as a physicist—in fact, he had almost finished a physics doctorate at Harvard before an encounter with Aristotle’s work (so dramatically different from the contemporary theories he was familiar with) piqued his interest in the history of science. After transitioning to work in the humanities, Kuhn began teaching at various universities (including Princeton and M.I.T.) and developing the argument that would later become his masterwork, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. After its publication in 1962, Kuhn’s radically new conceptualization of scientific progress—famous for having made the word “paradigm” a part of daily speech—sparked debates across many academic fields. Kuhn spent the next decades of his life revising his initial theory (as he does in the 1969 postscript to the original book), teaching, and raising his three children. By the time he died in 1996, he was widely considered to be the 20th century’s most important philosopher of science.