Duhem's opposition to positivism was partly informed by his traditionalist Catholicism, an outlook that put him at odds with the dominant academic currents in France during his lifetime.

[2] Pierre-Joseph worked as a sales representative in the textile industry and the family lived in a modest neighborhood on the Rue des Jeûneurs, just south of Monmartre.

[2] The family was devoutly Catholic and its conservative outlook was influenced by having lived through the Paris Commune of 1871, which the Duhems saw as a manifestation of the anarchy that must follow from the rejection of religion.

[2] The young Pierre completed his secondary studies at the Collège Stanislas, where his interest in the physical sciences was encouraged by his teacher Jules Moutier, who was a theoretical physicist and the author of influential textbooks on thermodynamics.

His approach was strongly influenced by the early works of Josiah Willard Gibbs, which Duhem effectively explained and promoted among French scientists.

[2] Influenced by William Rankine's "Outlines of the Science of Energetics",[3] Duhem carried out this intellectual project in his Traité de l'Énergétique (1911), but was ultimately unable to reduce electromagnetic phenomena to thermodynamic first principles.

[5][6] In 1914, Duhem commented that Einstein's relativity theory "has turned physics into a real chaos where logic loses its way and common-sense runs away frightened".

[13] Unlike many former historians (e.g. Voltaire and Condorcet), who denigrated the Middle Ages, he endeavored to show that the Roman Catholic Church had helped foster Western science in one of its most fruitful periods.

[14] Duhem concluded that "the mechanics and physics of which modern times are justifiably proud to proceed, by an uninterrupted series of scarcely perceptible improvements, from doctrines professed in the heart of the medieval schools.

In addition to the Copernican Revolution debate of "saving the phenomena" (Greek σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα, sozein ta phainomena[16])[17][18] versus offering explanations[19] that inspired Duhem was Thomas Aquinas, who wrote, regarding eccentrics and epicycles, thatReason may be employed in two ways to establish a point: firstly, for the purpose of furnishing sufficient proof of some principle.

Duhem’s formulation of his thesis is that “if the predicted phenomenon is not produced, not only is the questioned proposition put into doubt, but also the whole theoretical scaffolding used by the physicist”.

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.

Nonetheless, Duhem argues that it is important for the theologian or metaphysician to have detailed knowledge of physical theory in order not to make illegitimate use of it in speculations.

"[2] He died suddenly in 1916, at the relatively early age of 55, after suffering from a acute attack of angina while staying in a home that had belonged to his maternal grandfather in the small commune of Cabrespine, near the city of Carcassonne, in the southern department of the Aude.