More than any other major twentieth-century writer, Pierre Duhem has
been the victim of ill-informed guesswork. For instance, many references
to Duhem stress the importance of his Catholic faith, but nearly all of
them draw the obvious -- and entirely erroneous -- conclusions about the
role of Catholicism in Duhem's thinking.
Dr. Martin's study of Pierre Duhem's work is the fruit of many years of
painstaking research. The author's approach is cautious, yet his
conclusions are surprising, and refute many prevailing legends abut
Duhem. The real Duhem, however, is even more fascinating than the
legendary one.
This book pays particular attention to the political and intellectual
context of French Catholicism, wracked as it was by tensions of the
Dreyfuss affair and the so-called modernistic crisis. Duhem took his
inspiration, not from the papally-sponsored revival of the thought of
St. Thomas Aquinas, but from Pascal, a fact that aroused suspicions of
skepticism in the minds of conservative Catholics. The tensions between
Duhem's work and authoritarian Catholic positions became more explicit
as his historical work unfolded.
Most famous for his denial of the possibility of a crucial experiment
which could unambiguously decide between contending scientific theories,
Duhem has often been interpreted as a mere instrumentalist or
conventionalist, denying the meaningfulness of a reality behind the
theory. Dr. Martin shows that Duhem was a Pascalian who argued for both
logic and intuition as indispensable in approaching the truth.
Duhem argued that physics could not legitimately be used to attack
Christianity, but he held that physics was equally useless for the
defense of Christianity, a position which made him unpopular with many
Catholics.
Duhem is now well-known for his historical work refuting the myth that
there was no medieval science. Duhem demonstrated that figures like
Leonardo and Galileo were not isolated pioneers; far from being the
founder of a new science, they were continuing a tradition of the
scientific work that had been developing for centuries. It has been
surmised that Duhem was predisposed to rehabilitate medieval science for
apologetic motives. Martin shows that Duhem's discovery of medieval
science can be dated to within a month, and came as a complete surprise
to him, changing the whole course of his work, and introducing an abrupt
discontinuity between his earlier and his later preoccupations.
Furthermore, Duhem's findings in medieval intellectual history have
proved indigestible ever since, to believers and unbelievers alike.
