The Road Since Structure : Thomas S. Kuhn

The title refers to Kuhn's seminal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Published in 1962, in which he argued that the history of science is not gradual and Cumulative but instead is punctuated by a series of more or less radical "paradigm shifts." The new book reprints 11 essays in which Kuhn defends, develops and, in some cases, modifies the views he put forward in Structure. Trained as a physicist, Kuhn as a young man turned his interest to the history and philosophy of science. He discussed that change in an absorbing three-day interview that he had with three Greek scholars in 1995, the year before he died. "I think I would have been a damn good physicist," he remarked, but increasingly the field seemed to him to be "fairly dull, the work was not interesting." Of Structure, he said: "I wanted it to be an important book; clearly it was being an important book--I didn't like most of the ways in which it was being an important book." And, surprisingly for such an influential writer, he said that he had always found it "very hard to write." 

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