Abstract

Thomas S. Kuhn, historian and philosopher of science, was born on 18 July 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and died 17 June 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He entered Harvard in 1939 and remained there until 1956, receiving a Ph.D. in physics in 1949. For three years he was a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and then began teaching in James Bryant Conant's recently established General Education Program. Conant used a historical approach to communicate the nature of science to undergraduates; working with Conant helped shift Kuhn's interests from physics to the history of science. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at Berkeley for 9 years, at Princeton for 15, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 12. He retired from teaching in 1991.