The Road Since Structure. Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, With An Autobiographical Interview

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, is among the most important works of our time. It has been translated into twenty-five languages, and the English edition alone has sold more than one million copies. Structure established Kuhn as the century's most influential philosopher. During the last twenty years of his life, however, Kuhn was radically rethinking the central concepts of that work. When he died in 1996, he left an unfinished sequel to Structure and a plan for this volume, a collection of philosophical essays written since 1970. Divided into three parts, The Road since "Structure" is the fullest record we now have of the new direction Kuhn was taking during the last two decades of his life. The first part of the book consists of self-standing essays in which Kuhn refines the basic concepts set forth in Structure-paradigm shifts, incommensurability, and the nature of scientific progress. In part two, Kuhn replies at length to criticisms of his earlier work. Here the reader will find him arguing his position with many of his eminent contemporaries, including Paul Feyerabend, Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, and Charles Taylor. The third part of the volume is the transcript of a remarkable autobiographical interview with Kuhn conducted in Athens in 1995, not quite a year before his death. Here, the usually reticent Kuhn discusses his own intellectual development-his family and upbringing, his education, the influence of his training as a physicist, his war work, his relations with his colleagues, the responses to Structure-as well as his struggles to define his philosophical position both before and after that landmark work. The Road since "Structure" is an essential companion to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Forceful and accessible, it illuminates and further develops Kuhn's classic book, and it will interest and inform everyone who bas been engaged by Structure and the debates it launched. In it, they will find the story not only of Kuhn's development but also of the man himself.