Concept
Pierre Duhem
Overview
Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (French: [pjɛʁ mɔʁis maʁi dy.ɛm, moʁ-] ; 9 June 1861 – 14 September 1916) was a French theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and the theory of elasticity. Duhem was also a prolific historian of science, noted especially for his pioneering work on the European Middle Ages. As a philosopher of science, Duhem is credited with the "Duhem–Quine thesis" on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria. Duhem's opposition to positivism was partly informed by his traditionalist Catholicism, an outlook that put him at odds with the dominant academic currents in France during his lifetime.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
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But at the same time he leaves to natural mechanism under this to us indispensable _principle_ of an original _organisation_, an undeterminable but yet unmistakeable element, in reference to which the faculty of matter in an organised body is called by him a _formative impulse_ (in contrast to, and yet standing under the higher guidance and direction of, that merely mechanical _formative power_ universally resident…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Pierre Duhem is; the author is tied to Pierre Duhem in the knowledge graph.
For it will often be found that the originator of a science and even his latest successors remain attached to an erroneous idea, which they cannot render clear to themselves, and that they thus fail in determining the true content, the articulation or systematic unity, and the limits of their science.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
The author is tied to Pierre Duhem in the knowledge graph.
To the ordinary physicist the so-called _Actio in distans_ was a hopeless stumbling-block. If he did not comprehend the transmission (as it is called) of force where there was immediate contact, he was at least perfectly familiar with the outer aspect of it as a condition of his limited experience. It needed one beyond the mere hodman of science to say with Laplace: “We are so far from knowing all the agents of…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
States what Pierre Duhem is.
Philosophers who discussed Pierre Duhem
- George Berkeley
- Jean Buridan
- Roger Bacon
- John Philoponus
- Willard Van Orman Quine
- Imre Lakatos
- Édouard Le Roy
Related ideas
- De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Philosophical realism
- Deferent and epicycle
- History of science
- Isaac Newton
- Immanuel Kant
- Johannes Kepler
- Jean Buridan
- Synthese
- Middle Ages
- Validity (logic)
- Thomas Aquinas
- Plato
- Physicist
- Plutarch
- Roger Bacon
- Confirmation holism
- Copernican Revolution
- Statistical mechanics
- Positivism
- James Clerk Maxwell
- Flemish people
- Collège de France
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.