its Table of Contents) and that, on the other hand, the method used consists in providing (while remaining as faithful to the text as possible) a critical interpretation and commentary on the selected publications, to provide a brief introduction to the authors and the themes addressed. Lastly, owing to its publication within a dossier specifically dedicated to P. Duhem, to further explore the main arguments and ideas, which occupy nearly a third of the work, centered around this illustrious scholar. French historical epistemology can be defined as the conviction whereby a genuine and authentic historical perspective is seen as essential in order to establish a constructive dialogue between science and philosophy, and in order to construct an epistemology which better conforms to the reality of scientific approach. According to the traditional view adopted chiefly by A. Brenner and C. Chimisso, it originated, depending upon the chosen emphasis, either during the last decade of the 19th century with the works of H. Poincaré, P. Duhem and G. Milhaud (A. Brenner), or during the 1930s and 1940s with G. Bachelard as the key figure in this case (C. Chimisso). Without disputing the importance of the discussions conducted at the end of the 19th century, the point of this book consists in correcting the chronology that we just mentioned: this historicization of the epistemology or, to put it differently, this onset of a mutual engagement, both profound and sophisticated, between historiography and epistemology occurred during the 1860s, thus in the second half of the 19th century and not, as is commonly stated, at the extreme end of the 19th century, and certainly not during the first half of the 20th century. Consequently, it becomes instantly evident that H. Poincaré and P. Duhem, rather than constituting the starting point (A. Brenner) or even representing part of its ancestry (C. Chimisso), should be seen as a destination point (albeit provisional), which is particularly true for Duhem in as much as 1 Jean-François