Pierre Duhem
Western Philosophy
19th-century philosophy
Full name Pierre Duhem
Birth 10 June 1861
Death 14 September 1916
Main interests Physics, Philosophy of Science, History of Science, Epistemology
Notable ideas Confirmation Holism, Gibbs-Duhem Equation
Influenced by
Influenced

Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (10 June 1861 – 14 September 1916) was a French physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science, best known for his writings on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria and on scientific development in the Middle Ages. Duhem also made major contributions to the science of his day, particularly in the fields of hydrodynamics, elasticity, and thermodynamics.

Contents

Philosophy

Duhem's views on the philosophy of science are explicated in La théorie physique: son objet et sa structure.[1] In this work, he opposed Newton's statement that the Principia's law of universal mutual gravitation was deduced from 'phenomena', including Kepler's second and third laws. Newton's claims in this regard had already been attacked by critical proof-analyses of the German logician Leibniz and then most famously by Immanuel Kant, following Hume's logical critique of induction. But the novelty of Duhem's work was his proposal that Newton's theory of universal mutual gravity flatly contradicted Kepler's Laws of planetary motion because the interplanetary mutual gravitational perturbations caused deviations from Keplerian orbits. Since no proposition can be validly logically deduced from any it contradicts, according to Duhem, Newton must not have logically deduced his law of gravitation directly from Kepler's Laws.[1][2][3][4]

Duhem's name is given to the Quine-Duhem thesis, which holds that for any given set of observations there are an innumerably large number of explanations. Thus empirical evidence cannot force the revision of a theory. As such, the Quine-Duhem thesis is offered as an alternative to the use of Popper's criterion of falsification as a reliable means of distinguishing science from pseudoscience.

As popular as the Duhem-Quine thesis may be in the philosophy of science, in reality Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine stated very different theses. Pierre Duhem believed that experimental theory in physics is fundamentally different from fields like physiology and certain branches of chemistry. Also Duhem's conception of theoretical group has its limits, since not all concepts are connected to each other logically. He did not include at all a priori disciplines such as logic and mathematics within these theoretical groups in physics which can be tested experimentally. Quine, on the other hand, conceived this theoretical group as a unit of a whole human knowledge. To Quine, even mathematics and logic must be revised in light of recalcitrant experience, a thesis that Duhem never held.

History of Science

Nicole Oresme, a prominent medieval scholar. Duhem came to regard the medieval scholastic tradition as the origin of modern science

Duhem is well known for his work on the history of science, which resulted in the ten volume Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic (The System of World: A History Cosmological Doctrines from Plato to Copernicus).[5] Unlike many former historians (e.g. Voltaire and Condorcet), who denigrated the Middle Ages, he endeavored to show that the Roman Catholic Church had helped foster Western science in one of its most fruitful periods. His work in this field was originally prompted by his research into the origins of statics, where he encountered the works of medieval mathematicians and philosophers such as John Buridan,Nicole Oresme and Roger Bacon, whose sophistication surprised him. He consequently came to regard them as the founders of modern science, having in his view anticipated many of the discoveries of Galileo and later thinkers. Duhem concluded that 'the mechanics and physics of which modern times are justifiably proud to proceed, by an uninterrupted series of scarcely perceptible improvements, from doctrines professed in the heart of the medieval schools.'[6]

Other works

Duhem is also known for his work in thermodynamics, being in part responsible for the development of what is known as the Gibbs-Duhem relation.

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ a b Duhem, Pierre; Philip P. Wiener (1954). The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. Jules Vuillemin. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691025247. 
  2. ^ Lakatos, Imre; Paul Feyerabend, Matteo Motterlini (1999). For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence. University of Chicago Press. pp. 45–49. ISBN 9780226467740. 
  3. ^ Lakatos, Imre; John Worrall, Gregory Currie (1980). '5: Newton's Effect on Scientific Standards'. The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521280310. 
  4. ^ Lakatos, Imre; John Worrall, Gregory Currie (1978). '5: The Method of Analysis-Synthesis'. Mathematics, Science, and Epistemology. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521217699. 
  5. ^ Duhem, Pierre (1914). Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic (The System of World: A History Cosmological Doctrines from Plato to Copernicus). 
  6. ^ Duhem, Pierre. Les origines de la statique (The Origins of the Static). 1. Harvard University Press. pp. 38. 
  • Dijksterhuis, E.J. (1959). The Origins of Classical Mechanics from Aristotle to Newton M. Clagett (ed) Critical Problems in the History of Science, pp163-184 University of Wisconsin Proceedings 1957
  • Lowinger, Armand (1941). The Methodology of Pierre Duhem. Columbia University Press. 
  • Martin, R. N. D. (1991). Pierre Duhem: Philosophy and History in the Work of a Believing Physicist. ISBN 9780812691603. 
  • Moody, Ernest A. (1951). 'Galileo and Avempace: The Dynamics of the Leaning Tower Experiment'. Journal of the History of Ideas 12. 
  • Moody, Ernest A. (1966). 'Galileo and his Precursors'. Galileo Reappraised: 23-43. 
  • Stoffel, Jean-François; Stanley L. Jaki (1996). Pierre Duhem et ses doctorands: bibliographie de la littérature primaire et secondaire. Centre Interfacultaire d'Étude en Histoire des Sciences. pp. 325. ISBN 9782930175003. 
  • Stoffel, Jean-François; Jean Ladrière (2002). Le phénoménalisme problématique de Pierre Duhem. Brussels: Classe des lettres, Académie royale de Belgique. pp. 391. ISBN 9782803101900. 

External links

Retrieved from 'http://en.wikipedia.org/Pierre_Duhem'

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