Pierre Duhem
| Pierre Duhem | |
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| Born |
Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem 9 June 1861 Paris, France |
| Died | 14 September 1916 (aged 55) Cabrespine, France |
| Alma mater | École Normale Supérieure (diploma, 1882) |
| Era | 19th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School |
Continental philosophy French historical epistemology |
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Main interests
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Physics, philosophy of science, history of science, epistemology |
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Notable ideas
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Gibbs–Duhem equation, Duhem–Quine thesis, Confirmation holism |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (French: [pjɛʁ moʁis maʁi dy.ɛm]; 9 June 1861 – 14 September 1916) was a French physicist, mathematician, historian and philosopher of science. He is best known for his work on chemical thermodynamics, for his philosophical writings on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria, and for his historical research into the science of the European Middle Ages. As a scientist, Duhem also contributed to hydrodynamics and to the theory of elasticity.
Duhem's views on the philosophy of science are explicated in his 1906 work The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. 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.
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