Struktura vědeckých revolucí

The reader gets his hands on a new translation of a groundbreaking work that ranks among the most read books of the 20th century. Dalece has transcended the boundaries of its field and still deserves careful attention today.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, an essay first published in 1962, was written by Kuhn with the conviction that history can fundamentally alter our deeply held ideas about what science is. Drawing heavily on examples from the history of science, but also from psychology, for example, the author challenges the traditional linear conception of scientific progress as a gradual convergence toward truth, and instead presents his cyclical conception of scientific development as a revolutionary alternation of mutually incommensurable paradigms. The central theses of the book were often not treated to the author's satisfaction, and the conclusions drawn from them were often in stark contrast to Kuhn's original intentions.

Other philosophical works by Thomas S. Kuhn (1922 -1996) in which he developed and refined the ideas presented in the book were collected in the collections of texts The Essential Tension (1977) and The Road since Structure (eds. J. Conant and J. Haugeland, 2000). He has also published two historical monographs, The Copernican Revolution (1957) and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (1978). It is the latter of these works, dealing with the first quantum revolution in physics at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, which, in Kuhn's own words, is an illustration of exactly what he had in mind with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Czech edition