Panopticon's Author Index
Kk
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Kk Immanuel Kant
Soren Kierkegaard
Thomas Kuhn
Famous for his Critique of Pure Reason, a seminal philosophical text on how people relate to the world around them. Kant's work can be seen primarily as a riposte to Hume's skepticism and relativism. Taking a broadly Platonist philosophical position, Kant posited that a "noumeal" world exists beneath (or beyond) the "phenomenal" world which we experience every day. Even though we can't prove these "noumea" exist they have to be there, argued Kant, to make the whole thing work.
~~~~~~~~~~ Danish philosopher and "father" of Existentialism.
~~~~~~~~~~ A very influential man who helped to initiate the sociological study of science, Kuhn's best known for popularizing the term paradigm shift. (See his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.)
This comes from his most influential work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which posits that the history of science is not one of steady progress toward the "truth" but merely a progression of shifts in human frameworks of understanding, or "paradigms." These paradigms may help increase our abilities of control and prediction over the world, but are not really any "truer" in terms of their direct correspondence to the world. In this way, Kuhn resembles Derrida and [Richard] Rorty in emphasizing the nature of all human knowledge as "made" rather than "found." Like Paul Feyerabend and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Kuhn believes that science is therefore just another discourse helping us to try to understand our universe, and not a direct conduit to reality or first principles.
See also:
CT. Author Index Kk
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Last Updated: feb. 25, 2001