Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) was born in Paris and studied at the École Normale Supérieure. A first doctoral thesis on thermodynamic potential was turned down in 1884, but he published it as a book and earned his doctorate in 1888; he taught at Lille and Rennes and, from 1894 until his death, at the University of Bordeaux. He worked chiefly in thermodynamics, hydrodynamics and elasticity, and became also a pioneering historian of medieval science, arguing in Les Origines de la statique, the Études sur Léonard de Vinci and the multi-volume Système du monde that the scholastics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries prepared the way for Galileo. He was a devout Catholic. He was elected to the Académie des sciences in 1913 and died in 1916.
The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (La Théorie physique: son objet et sa structure) was published in Paris in 1906 by Pierre Duhem, professor of theoretical physics at Bordeaux, after appearing as a series of articles in the Revue de philosophie. A second edition (1914) added two essays, 'The Physics of a Believer' and 'The Value of Physical Theory'.
