We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
On Thomas Kuhn, James B. Conant, and the Place of History and Philosophy of Science in Postwar America
from Part I - Foundational Issues
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 June 2021
This essay examines Thomas Kuhn’s education and collaboration with Harvard President James Bryant Conant to consider his evolving view of relations between scholarship and politics. Aspects of Kuhn’s unpublished Lowell Lectures of 1951, correspondence with Philipp Frank from 1952, and Kuhn’s thoughts about general education from 1955 are examined to illustrate Kuhn’s intellectual movement away from the political interests and engagements of his youth and away from the salutary civic roles that Conant intended history of science to play in American education. Kuhn’s conception of what counts as methodological study of science and his conception of scientific communities, firmly separated and insulated from the sociology of public life, are upheld as central for understanding how, despite Kuhn’s formative relationship with the public-intellectual Conant, Kuhn evolved in the 1950s a style of professional scholarship about science that reached its fruition in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
