Everything about Pierre Duhem totally explained
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 the fields of
hydrodynamics,
elasticity, and
thermodynamics.
Philosophy
La théorie physique: son objet et sa structure. 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..
His 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 can't
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 didn't 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
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. Unlike many former historians (for example
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."
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
- Les théories de la chaleur (1895)
- Le mixte et la combinaison chimique. Essai sur l'évolution d'une idée (1902)
- L'évolution de la mécanique (1902)
- Les origines de la statique (1903)
- La théorie physique son objet et sa structure (1906)
- Études sur Léonard de Vinci. Paris, F. De Nobele, 1906-13; 1955. 3 v. 1. sér. I. Albert de Saxe et Léonard de Vinci. II. Léonard de Vinci et Villalpand. III. Léonard de Vinci et Bernardino Baldi. IV. Bernardino Baldi, Roberval dt Descartes. V. Thémon le fils du juif et Léonard de Vinci. VI. Léonard de Vinci, Cardan et Bernard Palissy. VII. La scientia de ponderibus et Léonard de Vinci. VIII. Albert de Saxe. 2. sér. IX. Léonard de Vinci et les deux infinis. X. Léonard de Vinci et la pluralité des mondes. XI. Nicolas de Cues et Léonard de Vinci. XII. Léonard de Vinci et les origines de la géologie. 3. sér. Les précurseurs parisiens de Galilée: XIII. Jean I. Buridan (de Béthune) et Léonard de Vinci. XIV. Le tradition de Buridan et la science italienne au XVIe siecle. XV. Dominique Soto et la scolastique parisienne.
- Sozein ta phainomena. Essai sur la Notion de Théorie physique de Platon à Galilée (1908)
- Traité de l'énergétique (1911)
- Le Système du Monde. Histoire des Doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic, 10 vols., (1913—1959)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Pierre Duhem'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://pierre_duhem.totallyexplained.com">Pierre Duhem Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
