The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview Paperback - 2002

First line

IT IS NOW ALMOST TWENTY YEARS since I first distinguished what I took to be two types of scientific development, normal and revolutionary.

From the rear cover

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, is one of 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 of science, but during the last twenty years of his life, 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 a collection of 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 essays, philosophical rather than historical in nature, 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 Kuhn arguing his position with some of the most significant philosophers of the time, including Paul Feyerabend and Karl Popper. 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 the definitive companion to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Forceful and accessible, it illuminates and further develops Kuhn's classic book, and it will intrigue everyone who has 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.