Abstract
Pierre Duhem can be looked upon as one of the heirs of a tradition of historical and philosophical researches that flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century. This tradition opposed the naïve historiography and epistemology of the positivist school. Beside the positivists of different leanings such as Littré, Laffitte, Wyrouboff, and Berthelot, we find Cournot, Naville, and Tannery, who developed sophisticated histories and philosophies of science focusing on the real scientific practice and its history. They unfolded elements of continuity and discontinuity in the history of science, and enlightened the complex relationship among experimental, mathematical, logical and philosophical components in scientific practice. In Pierre Duhem we find a systematic and vivid interpretation of these meta-theoretical issues, and a meaningful development of a cultural tradition that re-emerged in the second half of the twentieth century.
Highlights
The originality of Duhem’s meta-theoretical researches consisted in the interconnection between historical inquiry and philosophical analysis
The complexity of the natural world and the complexity of scientific practice urged him to go beyond the naïve historiography and epistemology of the positivist tradition
In some specific issues he discussed between 1892 and 1896, we can find some traces of the previous critical tradition. In the papers he published in this time span we do not find explicit references to scientists and philosophers who had previously put forward a critical analysis of scientific practice.2. This seems really surprising when we notice that Duhem always mentioned the scientists who had contributed to the establishment of the mathematical thermodynamics he developed in the same years
Summary
The last decades of the nineteenth century saw an “industrial and social revolution,” and the spread of new technologies (Barraclough 1964, 17, 36-8, and 40). In the French context, the most radical scientism can be traced back to the six volumes of the Cours de philosophie positive that Auguste Comte published between 1830 and 1842.5 He coined the expression “philosophie positive” in order to qualify his intellectual commitment His philosophical system was a “philosophy of sciences” that encompassed “every kind of phenomena”, social ones included, because all sciences had to be submitted “to a single method”. At least three strong metaphysical commitments supported his ambitious design: first, the rejection of any question that did not deal with a scientific approach to reality, second, the methodological unification among the different sciences, and third, the faith in human progress (Comte 1830, VII-VIII) Comte looked upon his philosophical system as the last stage in the history of civilisation. Where Whewell saw “a conception of the mind, which did not exist in the facts themselves”, or “a principle of connexion”, Mill found that our conceptions were always “conceptions of something which really is in the facts” (Mill 1848, 178-179, 390, 561, 576, and 586)
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