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Kuhn's failed student

posted Mar 9, 2011, 9:50 AM by Florin-Stefan Morar   [ updated Mar 9, 2011, 12:38 PM ]
There is this article in the NY times by a certain Mr. Errol Morris about his relationship with the historian and philosopher extraordinaire Thomas S. Kuhn. The article can be seen (i.e. I prefer to see it this way) as a personal vendetta, a quite despicable attempt to destroy Kuhn's reputation. 

Morris, who couldn't get into Harvard's History of Science program managed to get a recommendation letter from Erwin Hiebert and was admitted at Princeton (seen by him a consolation prize of sorts), where he was supposed to work with Kuhn. Morris had apparently a very bad relationship with Kuhn, for which he primarily blames Kuhn. In a quite standard character destruction kind of way, he depicts Kuhn as being intolerant, (he baned Morris to attend Saul Kripke's lectures at Princeton), a chain smoker (he claims that Kuhn smoked 7 packs of cigarettes a day) and violent (he claims that he threw a heavy ashtray at him). In what is depicted as a immoral and unlawful abuse of power Morris was kicked out of Princeton by Kuhn.  

I think that the article in and by itself offers good evidence why Morris being kicked out of Princeton wasn't really quite so immoral and unlawful. 

First of all it is clear that Morris never really understood what being a historian was really all about since, very ironically, commits in his article exactly the error of whigishness he pretents that Kuhn was trying so hard to teach him to avoid. What can be more whig and anachronistic than to excoriate somebody for being a cigarette smoker? Smoking might be an undesirably bad habit for us but it wasn't in any case so at the time Kuhn was around. Being an intellectual and not smoking - now that would have been really weird. How can somebody be a historian if he indiscriminately mixes the present and the past. Kuhn was right to kick Morris out of Princeton and it is only very right that he became a journalist, where anachronism is, more often than not, an asset, not a liability.

Secondly, here is what really caught my attention:

I had written a paper on James Clerk Maxwell’s displacement current for Kuhn’s seminar on 19th century electricity and magnetism. The paper might have been 30 or so double-spaced pages. Kuhn’s reply, typed on unlined yellow paper, was 30 pages, single-spaced, with Courier marching all the way from the left to the right side of the paper. No margins.

Just look at this. I mean, how could somebody who writes a 30 page response to your paper not be the greatest PhD advisor there can be. I would wish my advisors were like that. I think this fully rehabilitates Kuhn. 
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