Pierre Duhem and the Continuous Development of Science

When attempting to assess what history of science, doubtless an important element of our culture, owes to the French philosopher and scientist Pierre Duhem, one has to emphasise the critical role he played in rethinking the world outlook inherited from the preceding times and in developing a new one more apt to contemporary science. This analysis draws on such key Duhem’s writings as «The World System» («Le système du monde») and «Studies on Leonardo da Vinci» («Études sur Léonard de Vinci»). Two Duhem’s theses deserve particular attention. One is his assertion that Christianity (and the Catholic Church for that) did not impede, but rather contributed to the development of science having dispensed with cosmological assumptions of Greek Paganism incompatible with contemporary science. Secondly, Duhem argues that intuitions to pave way to the scientific revolution were first advocated by such Sorbonne Scholastics as Jean Buridan and Nicholas Oresme. It is noteworthy that the French scientist clearly underestimates the contribution of non-French thinkers to the emerging set of cultural axioms. Duhem’s new ontology of cognition is closely related to the ideas of new epistemology. Viewing evolution of science as a gradual continuous process, he endorsed the holist idea that isolated scientific propositions could neither be verified nor falsified. The truth of any proposition is inseparable from the truth of the system of hypotheses as a whole. Hence science progresses not by rejecting old theories, but by modifying them: in due course old concepts give way to new ones. This topical assumption that progress of science is to be viewed and understood in its specific socio-cultural context delineates the principle on which the answer to the no less topical question of the philosophy of culture, viz. why modern science has emerged in Europe rather than elsewhere, is to be based on.

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