Contrary to what might be expected given a religious or other motivation, Pierre Duhem's interest in mediaeval science was the result of his surprise encounter with Jordanus de Nemore while working on Les origines de la statique in the late autumn of 1903. Historical assumptions common among physicists at that time may explain this surprise, which occasioned a frantic search for more mediaeval precursors for Renaissance mechanics. It also raised serious historiographical problems that threatened even his methodological views, until they (...) were resolved in his To save the phenomena of 1908. (shrink)

Much speculation on the sources of Duhem's historical interests fails to account for the major shifts in these interests: neither his belief in the continuous development of physics nor his Catholicism, when his Church was encouraging the study of generally Aristotelian scholastic thought, led to any interest in mediaeval science before 1904. Equally, his own claim that he was merely testing his views on the nature of physical theory is easily squared only with earlier work with no trace of mediaeval (...) science. Behind this discontinuity lies a major crisis. Though not a positivist, Duhem had based all his work on assumptions acceptable to positivists. One of these, the sterility of the Middle Ages, was refuted by his chance discovery of evidence of genuine mediaeval science in the autumn of 1903, but that left the doctrine of scholastic sterility intact. (shrink)

We call attention to the historical fact that the meaning of symmetry in antiquity—as it appears in Vitruvius’s De architectura—is entirely different from the modern concept. This leads us to the question, what is the evidence for the changes in the meaning of the term symmetry, and what were the different meanings attached to it? We show that the meaning of the term in an aesthetic sense gradually shifted in the context of architecture before the image of the balance was (...) attached to the term in the middle of the 18th century and well before the first modern scientific usage by Legendre in 1794.Keywords: Symmetry; Vitruvius; Claude Perrault; Charles-Louis de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu; Balance in architecture. (shrink)