Duhem’s historical account met with an opposition that was partly motivated by hostility
to his positivistic understanding of science as ‘saving the appearances’. Edwin Burtt
(1892–1989) and Alexander Koyre´ (1892–1964), the most important of the historians of
science who followed Duhem and reacted against him, were both inclined towards scientific
realism, and both of them held that abandonment of an Aristotelian metaphysics was
essential for the proper development of science––that this abandonment was in fact a true
scientific revolution in something like the Enlightenment sense