Pierre Maurice Duhem was born in Paris. He was a physicist, epistemologist, and historian of science. He maintained that the history of science and ideas is important for a correct scientific epistemology. He contributed to a reexamination of the role Christian theology played in the formation of the Western scientific spirit, chiefly through his monumental work Le système du monde. Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic (10 volumes), whose publication was completed after his death. Duhem criticized the claims of the mechanist and materialist philosophies, stating that they operated on illegitimate extrapolations from results obtained in physics. He considered metaphysics the field of first principles and of the notions upon which physics is based, while leaving physics the full freedom to formulate its own models and delineations. His principal reflections on the relationships between physics and metaphysics are found in his work La théorie physique, son objet et sa structure (1906). One of his works has recently been published in English, Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science, edited by R. Ariew and P. Barker (Cambridge: Hackett Pub. Co., 1996).