File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/d-g_Jun.96, message 177


Date: Wed, 19 Jun 1996 11:08:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: Spoon Collective <spoons-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU>
Subject: Forwarded mail....




---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 1996 13:37:07 +0300
From: Mr Background <daemon-AT-phoenix.oulu.fi>

> To: technology-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: Thomas Kuhn Dies
> From: jya-AT-pipeline.com (John Young)
> 
>    The New York Times, June 19, 1996, p. B7. 
>  
>  
>    Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm [Obituary] 
>  
>    By Lawrence Van Gelder 
>  
>  
>    Thomas S. Kuhn, whose theory of sclentific revolution 
>    became a profoundly influential landmark of 20th-century 
>    intellectual history, died on Monday at his home in 
>    Cambridge, Mass. He was 73. 
>  
>    Robert Dilorio, associate director of the news office at 
>    the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the 
>    scholar, who held the title of professor emeritus at 
>    M.I.T., had been ill with cancer in recent years. 
>  
>    "The Structure of Scientific RevoIutions," was conceived 
>    while Protessor Kuhn was a graduate student in theoretical 
>    physics and published as a monograph in the International 
>    Encyclopedia of Unified Science before the University of 
>    Chicago Press issued it as a 180-page book in 1962. The 
>    work punctured the widely held notion that scientific 
>    change was a strictly rational process. 
>  
>    Professor's Kuhn's treatise influenced not only scientists 
>    but also economists, historians, sociologists and 
>    philosophers, touching off considerable debate. It has sold 
>    about one million copies in 16 languages and remains 
>    required reading in many basic courses in the history and 
>    philosophy of science. 
>  
>    Dr. Kuhn, a professor of philosophy and history of science 
>    at M.I.T. from 1979 to 1983 and the Laurence S. Rockefeller 
>    Professor of Philosophy there from 1983 until 1991, was the 
>    author or co-author of five books and scores of articles on 
>    the philosophy and history of science. But Dr. Kuhn 
>    remained best known for "The Structure of Scientific 
>    Revolutions." 
>  
>    His thesis was that science was not a steady, cumulative 
>    acquisition of knowledge. Instead, he wrote, it is "a 
>    series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually 
>    violent revolutions." And in those revolutions, he wrote, 
>    "one conceptual world view is replaced by another." 
>  
>    Thus, Einstein's theory of relativity could challenge 
>    Newton's concepts of physics. Lavoisier's discovery of 
>    oxygen could sweep away earlier ideas about phlogiston, the 
>    imaginary element believed to cause combustion. Galileo's 
>    supposed experiments with wood and lead balls dropped from 
>    the Leaning Tower of Pisa could banish the Aristotelian 
>    theory that bodies fell at a speed proportional to their 
>    weight. And Darwin's theory of natural selection could 
>    overthrow theories of a world governed by design. 
>  
>    Professor Kuhn argued in the book that the typical 
>    scientist was not an objective, free thinker and skeptic. 
>    Rather, he was a somewhat conservative individual who 
>    accepted what he was taught and appiied his knowledge to 
>    solving the problems that came before him. 
>  
>    In so doing, Professor Kuhn maintained, these scientists 
>    accepted a paradigm, an archetypal solution to a problem, 
>    like Ptolemy's theory that the Sun revolves around the 
>    Earth. Generally conservative, scientists would tend to 
>    solve problems in ways that extended the scope of the 
>    paradigm. 
>  
>    In such periods, he maintained, scientists tend to resist 
>    research that might signal the development of a new 
>    paradigm, like the work of the astronomer Aristarchus, who 
>    theorized in the third century B.C. that the planets 
>    revolve around the Sun. But, Professor Kuhn said, 
>    situations arose that the paradigm could not account for or 
>    that contradicted it. 
>  
>    And then, he said, a revolutionary would appear, a 
>    Lavoisier or an Einstein, often a young scientist not 
>    indoctrinated in the accepted theories, and sweep the old 
>    paradigm away. 
>  
>    These revolutions, he said, came only after long periods of 
>    tradition-bound normal science. "Frameworks must be lived 
>    with and explored before they can be broken," Professor 
>    Kuhn said. 
>  
>    The new paradigm cannot build on the one that precedes it, 
>    he maintained. It can only supplant it. The two, he said, 
>    were "incommensurable." 
>  
>    Some critics said Professor Kuhn was arguing that scieace 
>    was little more than mob rule. He replied, "Look, I think 
>    that's nonsense, and I'm prepared to argue that." 
>  
>    The word paradigm appeared so frequently in Professor's 
>    Kuhn's "Structures" and with so many possible meanings 
>    prompting debate that he was credited with popularizing the 
>    word and inspiring a 1974 cartoon in The New Yorker. In. 
>    it, a woman tells a man: "Dynamite, Mr. Gerston! You're the 
>    first person I ever heard use 'paradigm' in real life." 
>  
>    Professor Kuhn traced the origin of his thesis to a moment 
>    in 1947 when he was working toward a doctorate in physics 
>    at Harvard. James B. Conant, the chemist who was the 
>    president of the university, had asked him to teach a class 
>    in science for undergraduates majoring in the humanities. 
>    The focus was to be historical case studies. 
>  
>    Until then, Professor Kuhn said later, "I'd never read an 
>    old document in science." As he looked through Aristotle's 
>    "Physics" and realized how astonishingly unlike Newton's 
>    were its concepts of motion and matter, he concluded that 
>    Aristotle's physics were not "bad Newton" but simply 
>    different. 
>  
>    Professor Kuhn received a doctorate in physics, but not 
>    long afterward he switched to the history of science 
>    exploring the mechanisms that lead to scientific change. 
>  
>    "I sweated blood and blood and blood, and finally I had a 
>    breakthrough," he said. 
>  
>    Thomas Samuel Kuhn, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an 
>    industrial engineer, and the former Annette Stroock, was 
>    born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati. 
>  
>    In 1943, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with a 
>    bachelor's degree in physics. 
>  
>    During World War II, he served as a civilian employee at 
>    Harvard and in Europe with the Office of Scientific 
>    Research and Development. 
>  
>    He received master's and doctoral degrees in physics from 
>    Harvard in 1946 and 1949. From 1948 to 1956, he held 
>    various posts at Harvard, rising to an assistant 
>    professorship in general education and the history of 
>    science. 
>  
>    He then joined the faculty of the University of California 
>    at Berkeley, where he was named a professor of history of 
>    science in 1961. In 1964, he joined the faculty at 
>    Princeton, where he was the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of 
>    Philosophy and History of Science until 1979, when he 
>    joined the faculty of M.I.T. 
>  
>    Professor Kuhn was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954-55, the 
>    winner of the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science 
>    in 1982, and the holder of honorary degrees from many 
>    institutions, among them the University of Notre Dame, 
>    Columbia University, the University of Chicago the 
>    University of Padua and the University of Athens. 
>  
>    He is survived by his wife, Jehane and three children, 
>    Sarah Kuhn of Framingham, Mass., Elizabeth Kuhn of Los 
>    Angeles and Nathaniel Kuhn of Arlington, Mass. 
>  
>    [Photo] Thomas S. Kuhn 
>  
>    [End] 
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  

Tunnus technology on lukittu koska Phoenix ja Zombie poistuvat
kaytosta. Koeta lahettaa postisi osoitteella :
technology-AT-raita.oulu.fi

Account technology is locked, since Phoenix and Zombie are being
prepared to get removed from use. Try to send your mail with address:
technology-AT-raita.oulu.fi



     ------------------

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005