In “To save the phe­no­me­na”, Duhem, as is com­mon­ly belie­ved, pur­sued two goals : first­ly, to inte­grate his phe­no­me­na­list epis­te­mo­lo­gy into an age‐old his­to­ri­cal tra­di­tion ; and second­ly, to reveal, in the “Gali­leo Affair”, how logic pre­vai­led when it came to Osian­der and Bel­lar­mine, rather than in the case of the Flo­ren­tine astro­no­mer. Both of these goals were har­sh­ly cri­ti­ci­sed, and to such an extent that, having been jud­ged inca­pable of pro­vi­ding Duhe­mian phe­no­me­na­lism with a his­to­ri­cal foo­thold, this book came to be seen as an unfor­tu­nate and apo­lo­ge­tic excur­sus, as if a mere foot­note in an other­wise uni­fied lite­ra­ry pro­duc­tion. Intent on res­to­ring this text to its right­ful place within the grea­ter work, such as ini­tial­ly inten­ded by its author, this article, after having bet­ter defi­ned the scope of these two tra­di­tio­nal goals, aims to uphold both their exis­tence and their inherent com­ple­men­ta­ri­ty, while ques­tio­ning the under­lying assump­tions. The out­come demons­trates that the real issue this book raises is one of the contra­dic­tion, whe­ther actual or appa­rent, bet­ween two simul­ta­neous claims made by the French phy­si­cist : one, in his “To save the phe­no­me­na”, in favour of a narrow‐minded phe­no­me­na­lism ; the other, in his “Valeur de la théo­rie phy­sique”, sup­por­ting an Asymp­to­tic realism.