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Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition

Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem , 1861-1916, French physicist and philosopher and historian of science. After studying at the École Normale Supérieure he taught at Lille (1887-1893), Rennes (1893-1894), and Bordeaux (1894-1916). His extension and application of the thermodynamic potential to topics in chemistry ranks him among the founders of modern physical chemistry. His Traité d'énergétique générale (2 vol., 1911) aimed at a generalized, abstract thermodynamics that subsumed classical mechanics. His major philosophical work, La théorie physique: Son objet, sa structure (1906; tr. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, 1954), depreciates pictorial models in favor of an axiomatic approach, according to which a physical theory is not an explanation, but a system of mathematical propositions that represents experimental laws. As a historian Duhem discovered important currents of medieval thought in physics, cosmology, and astronomy, which he saw as precursors of the 17th-century scientific revolution. He set forth this material, hitherto almost unknown, in Études sur Léonard de Vinci (3 vol., 1906-13) and Le Système du monde (10 vol., 1913-59).

Bibliography: See study by A. Lowinger (1941).


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