Thomas Kuhn as Historian

Thomas Kuhn as Historian is the companion volume to Thomas Kuhn: The Reluctant Revolutionary by the same author and is the first book to focus exclusively on Kuhn’s historical writing.

The book takes in The Copernican Revolution and Black-Body Theory & The Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912, as well as Kuhn’s work on the Bohr Atom and the crisis of the old quantum theory. The book also assesses the relation of Kuhn’s historical work to his philosophical output as well as examining his strained relationship with the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge movement that Structure inadvertently inspired. Although by the end of his career Kuhn had abandoned the history of science entirely and was keen to stress his identity as a philosopher, Timmins argues that in the end Kuhn was probably a better historian of science than a philosopher of science.

Thomas Kuhn as Historian is essential reading for all scholars, researchers, and advanced students of the work of Thomas Kuhn, the philosophy of science, and the history of science.