 pierre maurice marie duhem (; 9 junejaki, stanley l. (1987). uneasy genius: the life and work of pierre duhem. dordrecht: martinus nijhoff, p. 3. 1861 â 14 september 1916) was a french physicist, mathematician, historian and philosopher of science, best known for his writings on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria and on scientific development in the middle ages. duhem also made major contributions to the science of his day, particularly in the fields of hydrodynamics, elasticity, and thermodynamics. ==philosophy== duhem's views on the philosophy of science are explicated in his 1906 work the aim and structure of physical theory. in this work, he opposed newton's statement that the principia's law of universal mutual gravitation was deduced from 'phenomena', including kepler's second and third laws. newton's claims in this regard had already been attacked by critical proof-analyses of the german logician leibniz and then most famously by immanuel kant, following hume's logical critique of induction. but the novelty of duhem's work was his proposal that newton's theory of universal mutual gravity flatly contradicted kepler's laws of planetary motion because the interplanetary mutual gravitational perturbations caused deviations from keplerian orbits. since no proposition can be validly logically deduced from any it contradicts, according to duhem, newton must not have logically deduced his law of gravitation directly from kepler's laws.{{cite book|last=lakatos|
1861_births 1916_deaths French_Roman_Catholics Historians_of_science People_from_Paris Philosophers_of_science Acole_Normale_SupA(c)rieure_alumni