Prémices philosophiques: Présentées avec une introduction en anglais

255 Pages·1987·22.54 MB·French

by  Pierre M. Duhem

PRÉMICES PHILOSOPHIQUES
BRILL'S STUDIES
IN
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
General Editor
A.J. VANDERJAGT, University of Groningen
Editorial Board
M. COLISH, Oberlin College
J.I. ISRAEL, University College, London
J.D. NORTH, University of Groningen
R.H. POPKIN, Washington University, St. Louis — UCLA
VOLUME 3
PIERRE DUHEM
PREMICES PHILOSOPHIQUES
PRÉSENTÉES AVEC UNE INTRODUCTION EN ANGLAIS
PAR
STANLEY L. JAKI
E.J. BRILL
LEIDEN • NEW YORK • K0BENHAVN • KÔLN
1987
The six articles forming the six chapters of this book originally appeared
in the following issues of the Revue des questions scientifiques:
31 (Janvier 1892), pp. 139-77
33 (Janvier 1893), pp. 90-133
34 (juillet 1893), pp. 55-83
34 (octobre 1893), pp. 345-378
36 (juillet 1894), pp. 179-229
40 (octobre 1896), pp. 463-499
The articles are reprinted with new running heads and with new page
numbering.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Duhem, Pierre Maurice Marie, 1861-1916.
Prémices philosophiques.
(Brill's studies in intellectual history ; v. 3)
"The six articles forming the six chapters of this
book originally appeared in ... issues of the Revue des
questions scientifiques"—P. iv.
Includes index.
1. Physics—Philosophy—Collected works. 2. Physics—
History—Collected works. 3. Science—Philosophy—
Collected works. 4. Science—History—Collected works.
I. Jaki, Stanley L. II. Title. III. Series.
QC5.58.D84 1987 530'.01 86-33418
ISBN 90-04-08117-8
ISSN 0920-8607
ISBN 90 04 08117 8
Copyright 1987 by E. J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
translated in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche
or any other means without written permission from the publisher
PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS
TABLE DES MATIÈRES
Introduction par Stanley L. Jaki vu
1. Quelques réflexions au sujet des théories physiques i
2. Une nouvelle théorie du monde inorganique 40
3. Physique et métaphysique 84
4. L'Ecole anglaise et les théories physiques 113
5. Quelques réflexions au sujet de la physique expérimentale .... 147
6. L'Evolution des théories physiques du XVIIe siècle jusqu'à
nos jours 198
Index 235

INTRODUCTION
''Being eternal, logic can be patient," so concluded Pierre Duhem the
first and by far longest section of the account, or Notice, he wrote about
his work to the Académie des Sciences in the spring of 1913. The Notice
was a formality on behalf of his election, which took place in early
December, as one of the first six non-resident members of the Académie.1
That he was the last of the six to be elected was in itself a good reason
for patience. He had more patience than many of his admirers, in France
and abroad, who by the summer began to clamor for an election whereby
the French academic world partly atoned for a signal injustice, the
lifelong banishing of Duhem to the provinces.
If time is a test of true value, Duhem should have been elected already
in May as the first of those six. Of the other five only the name of Paul
Sabatier, a Nobel laureate chemist from Toulouse, has occasionally ap
peared in print for the rest of the century. Interest in the thought of
Duhem has never ceased and became increasingly strong for the past two
or three decades. His thought proved itself vast and creative in three
fields: theoretical physics, philosophy of physics, and history of science.
Not that Duhem wanted to be chiefly remembered as a philosopher or
a historian. His studies relating to these two fields were exclusively in the
service of his overriding interest: doing physics in the logically most
unobjectionable way.
Such an interest has little appeal to the ever strong hunger for novelty.
In fact Duhem as a physicist had little appeal for a growing number of
physicists in France by the time he was elected to the Académie. In a let
ter to his daughter, Hélène, who impatiently waited for his election,
Duhem spoke of it as being just one more nail driven by some of his
fellow physicists into that coffin in which they wanted to bury him while
still alive. Those were the years when the first glimpses were caught of
the world of atoms, the years of widespread belief that atoms were bits
of machinery of ordinary matter, in proof of the mechanistic philosophy
that had grown around Newtonian physics.
Today, when "fundamental" particles are counted by the dozens if
not by the hundreds, when for physicists matter is more elusive than
ever, when many physicists think that matter can be scooped out of
nothing by mere cleverness with mathematical operations, Duhem's
1 For details on this and other data mentioned in this Introduction, see my Uneasy Genius: The Life
and Work of Pierre Duhem (Dordrecht, London, Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984).
VIII INTRODUCTION
reference to patience may appear quite logical. His logic seems to be vin
dicated by the increasing recognition that since fundamental particles are
best to be taken for resonances, physics in essence is a consistent co
ordination of measurements of energy. The "énergétique" of Duhem,
a favorite target of arrogant and facile criticism, may indeed have already
re-entered the scene in a new garb. Again, while still in his prime Duhem
became a dinosaur in the eyes of the wave of the future, such as the
Curies, Perrin, Langevin and others, for his insistence on continuity
methods in physics, unexpected solutions are found in his long-buried
memoirs for problems posed by plasma physics, an ever widening field
stretching from nuclear fusion to galactic structure.
The over a hundred pages taken up in the Notice by his account of his
work in physics dwarf the dozen pages he devoted there respectively to
his work in the philosophy and in the history of physics. Yet this lopsided
proportion does not reflect the actual proportion of his publications in
those three fields. Of the total of over twenty-five thousand printed pages
about eight thousand relate to the history of physics—it is enough to
think of the ten, three, and two massive volumes of his Le système du
monde, Etudes sur Léonard de Vinci, and Les origines de la statique. The forty
years that elapsed between Duhem's death in 1916 and the posthumous
publication of the last five volumes of the Système once more proved
Duhem's dictum about the vindication by patience of perennial valor.
Reference to patience in that sense is also appropriate in connection
with his production relating to the philosophy of physics. Of that produc
tion only a part, La théorie physique, is spoken about, though hardly ever
with the thoroughness due to a masterpiece. First it was taken for a classic
by the positivist interpreters of physics, a sort of French refashioning of
Mach's thought. Curiously, no second thoughts were aroused by the
paucity of letters exchanged between Mach and Duhem, invariably
amounting to expressions of mere courtesy. Later, the author of La théorie
physique was turned into a forerunner and ally of authors delivering
messages in direct contradiction to that masterpiece and even their
favorite labels. A case in point is the message, in the guise of the logic
of discovery, that there is no logic to be found there; another is the revel
ling in the radical disconnectedness of successive phases of the history of
science in terms of a structure for scientific revolutions, as if structure did
not mean an over-arching coherence. Sundry interpreters of science who
sink it into the murky abysses of psychohistory, sociologism, and even of
plain mythologizing are also wont to claim Duhem by misinter
preting the thrust of his portrayal of the stamp which the nationality of
a physicist may put on his physical theory. The aim and structure
of physics, as conceived by Duhem, meant something far deeper
INTRODUCTION IX
than that stamp, to say nothing of the shallows of his misinterpreters.
While Duhem discoursed lucidly in La théorie physique on hypotheses
and deductions made from them, he had a far deeper philosophy than the
one characteristic of the spokesmen of the hypothetico-deductive model,
who often use their pedantic dissection of scientific method for a cover-up
of their disdain for ontology and metaphysics. Duhem was enough of a
logician to know that ontological relativity is a contradiction in terms as
long as ontology is taken for the study of being as such and not for some
thing else. This point was never suspected by the architects and en
thusiasts of what so unfortunately and unjustly has been called the
Duhem-Quine thesis.
There is a pattern in all that. Decades ago, when émigrés of the Vien
na Circle took over most leading American philosophical establishments,
Duhem was allowed to enter the scene only on the coattails of Mach and
Schlick. More recently, his entry ticket became glued to the dossiers of
Popper, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, to name a few. That he was called
upon in so many disparate contexts was an indirect recognition of his
stature towering above the ''greats" of 20th-century philosophy of
science. In view of this chronic misconstruction of Duhem's philosophy
as set forth in La théorie physique, study of his other philosophical writings
may not have nipped in the bud systematic misconceptions about him.
Yet warning voices may have been raised time and again if the essays
republished here had been readily available in book form shortly after
World War II when the philosophy of science suddenly became the
fashion of philosophers, and reprints and complete editions were for a
while a fairly inexpensive vogue.
For in these essays Duhem speaks with an abandon, verve, and direct
ness which are not so evident in La théorie physique. Half of the essays
reverberate with the persuasiveness of the brilliant teacher he was. That
he knew how to drive home the essentials, is well illustrated in the first
of the essays here reprinted, the opening lecture of Duhem's course on
mathematical physics at the University of Lille. His audience was a
talented group of students preparing for the licence and agrégation. One of
them, Lucien Marchis, became thirty years later the first occupant of the
chair for aeronautics at the Sorbonne. It was under his students' search
ing questions that Duhem—who took up, after brilliant but also tragic
studies at the Ecole Normale, his first teaching job in Lille in 1887—fully
perceived the fallacy of mechanistic physics insofar as it was a search for
visible and invisible mechanisms in nature.
But unlike other physicists—a Kirchoff, a Hertz, a Clifford, a Mach,
and others who also had perceived that fallacy—Duhem did not despair
of physical reality. Unlike them, he did not call for a purely methodical