entific achievements but he firmly opposed the positivistic trend.21 Boutroux' theses were put forward in a context where positivism was hegemonic; nevertheless, the following year, Cournot published another book where his anti-reductionist attitude was further developed. Nevertheless, his philosophy of science was more cautious and pliable than Boutroux's. The development of life sciences required a new epistemology: statistics and probability allowed scientists to replace certainty with probability. Cournot pursued a new alliance between determinism and contingency, between the stability of laws and the contingency of facts. In the late 1870s we find that some physiologists and physicians rejected reductionism (Egger 1877, 193-196, 197-198, 200-201, 209-211) but the majority was less cautious than Cournot, and put forward a radical reduction of psychology, anthropology, and sociology 20 It is worth remarking that, in the twentieth century, Thomas Kuhn inquired extensively into the two traditions (Kuhn 1976, 4-22). 21 Benrubi stressed that Boutroux' contingency should not be confused with chance: it was close to the idea of natural freedom, in the sense of free and unpredictable unfolding of natural laws. In other words, contingency occupied the intermediate place between chance and necessity (Benrubi 1926, 154-157). Stefano Bordoni – The French Roots of Duhem's early Historiography and Epistemology 27 to brain physiology (Luys 1876, VIII-XI; Boëns 1878, 345-347, 349-354, and 359-360; Boëns 1879, 5-9, and 14-15). Cournot pointed out the impossibility of getting rid of meta-theoretical practices that "positivist philosophers" had discarded together with metaphysics (Cournot 1875, 371 and 373-5). His words echoed what Whewell had written some decades before: he stressed that "a body of purely empirical knowledge is not a real science" (Cournot 1875, 371-376). On the other hand, Pierre Laffitte, one of Comte's most passionate followers, and the head of the community that accepted the whole of Comte's doctrine, 