Posts com a Tag ‘LEITE Fábio Rodrigo (Org d)’

We are pleased to present in this issue a tribute to the thought of Pierre Duhem, on the occasion of the centenary of his death that occurred in 2016. Among articles and book reviews, the dossier contains 14 contributions of scholars from different places across the world, from Europe (Belgium, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Sweden) to the Americas (Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the United States). And this is something that attests to the increasing scope of influence exerted by the French physicist, philosopher and historian.

It is quite true that since his passing, Duhem has been remembered in the writings of many of those who knew him directly. However, with very few exceptions (Manville et al. 1927), the comments devoted to him exhibited clear biographical and hagiographic characteristics of a generalist nature (see Jordan 1917; Picard 1921; Mentré 1922a; 1922b; Humbert 1932; Pierre-Duhem 1936; Ocagne et al. 1937). From the 1950s onwards, when the studies on his philosophical work resumed, the thought of the Professor from Bordeaux acquired an irrevocable importance, so that references to La théorie physique: Son objet et sa structure became a common place in the literature of the area. As we know, this recovery was a consequence of the prominence attributed, firstly, to the notorious Duhem-Quine thesis in the Englishspeaking world, and secondly to the sparse and biased comments made by Popper that generated an avalanche of revaluations of the Popperian “instrumentalist interpretation”. The constant references Duhem received from Philipp Frank, translator of L’évolution de la mécanique into German as early as 1912, certainly cannot be disregarded (see Duhem 1912 [1903]). As it happened, the reception of Duhem’s ideas conditioned the subsequent debate on the prevailing preferences in the English-speaking world, namely, the thesis of underdetermination of theories by data, the merely representative value of theories, the criticism of the inductive method, and, especially, the holism and criticism of the crucial experiment, culminating in the volume edited by Sandra Harding (1976). Leia Mais