A must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century.
This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the problems that it raised but did not resolve. The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, The Presence of Past Science. An introduction by the editor describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds and sheds light on its central philosophical problems.
Kuhn's aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. In his view, incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of the real world that science investigates, the rationality of scientific change, and the idea that scientific development is progressive.
Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-96) was an American philosopher and the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, his books include The Copernican Revolution, The Essential Tension, and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912, all also published by the University of Chicago Press. Bojana Mladenovic is professor of philosophy at Williams College. She is the author of Kuhn's Legacy: Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, and Pragmatism.
Title: The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science
Author: Kuhn, Thomas S.
ISBN: 9780226822747
Binding:
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 2022-12-02
Number of Pages: 312
Weight: 0.6102 kg
Combining Kuhn's unfinished last book, The Plurality of Worlds, with two related works not previously available in English, and a substantial and illuminating introduction by editor Bojana Mladenovic, The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn will be received as an absolute gem by philosophers of science, as well as by the wide swath of academics across the social sciences and humanities who revere Kuhn. -- Cheryl Misak, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, author of Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers
Thomas S. Kuhn's seminal 1962 history The Structure of Scientific Revolutions gets a posthumous follow-up in this complex volume edited by Mladenovic. . . . Philosophy lovers... will find plenty to chew on. * Publishers Weekly *