The Essential Tension

"The Essential Tension" is a collection of previously published essays by Thomas Kuhn to which the author has added two hitherto unpublished articles and a splendid, partly autobiographical preface. These assembled studies shed much light on the early evolution and subsequent reformulations of Kuhn's provocative "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962; revised edition 1970). Read as a group, they reveal a profound and subtle mind struggling to articulate and to resolve tensions between different modes of knowing and experiencing