Beyond Structure: New Frontiers of the Philosophy of Thomas Kuhn (original) (raw)

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is widely considered as one of the mostimportant philosophers of science of the 20th century, while hisTheStructure of Scientific Revolutions(SSR) is regarded as one of themost influential works in the philosophy ofscience. At the sametime, however, his place within philosophy of science remainsambiguous. On the one hand, despite the popularity of SSR, thereis no proper‘Kuhnian school of thought’in HPS. On the otherhand, the interest towards Kuhn does not seem to fade away andthe number of publications about his work does not seem todecrease. We suggest that there are at least three different waysto go‘beyond SSR’: (i) by scrutinising the development of Kuhn’sthought, from his pre- to his post-SSR writings; (ii) bycontextualising Kuhn in the philosophical milieu of his time, thusinterpreting his view as emerging from the intellectual exchangeshe had with contemporary philosophers; (iii) by reinterpretingand developing some of his most known ideas, in ways that perhaps Kuhn himself was not able to contemplate