By ack­now­led­ging the overw­hel­ming influence exer­ted by Paul Man­sion on Pierre Duhem ever since the for­mer revea­led the exis­tence of a phe­no­me­na­lis­tic mil­le­na­ry tra­di­tion to the lat­ter, espe­cial­ly one that was ful­ly loa­ded and rea­dy for use in the ongoing epis­te­mo­lo­gi­cal bat­tle, this article exa­mines whe­ther it might be appro­priate to extend this influence to include the sphere of apo­lo­ge­tics : was Duhem’s dis­co­ve­ry of such prac­tices a per­so­nal one which he then pas­sed on to his col­league, or did he also receive, in addi­tion to the reve­la­tion of the exis­tence of this tra­di­tion, an indi­ca­tion of its infer­red apo­lo­ge­tic prac­tices from him, par­ti­cu­lar­ly with res­pect to the Gali­leo affair ? Even if, due to the lack of a suf­fi­cient­ly pre­cise time­line, it is not always pos­sible to dis­tin­guish bet­ween a simple coin­ci­dence of ideas and an actual, mani­fest influence, the stri­king simi­la­ri­ties bet­ween their inter­pre­ta­tions of the Gali­leo affair sug­gest that the ini­tial dis­co­ve­ry of the phe­no­me­na­lis­tic tradition’s exis­tence was indeed accom­pa­nied by an indi­ca­tion of cer­tain infer­red apo­lo­ge­tic prac­tices. This leads us to the conclude, on one hand, that Mansion’s contri­bu­tion was grea­ter than expec­ted, and, on the other hand, that this contri­bu­tion, which Man­sion him­self had alrea­dy inclu­ded in an apo­lo­ge­tic context, had ini­tial­ly been used by Duhem in an epis­te­mo­lo­gi­cal one before having also been applied, fol­lo­wing the example of his muse, to an apo­lo­ge­tic context.