Imre Lakatos

1922-1974 · Hungarian-British · Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mathematics, Historiography of Science

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

Imre Lakatos was born Imre Lipschitz in Hungary in 1922, changed his name to survive the Nazi occupation, threw himself into postwar Communism, and was then imprisoned for three years in the Stalinist purges he had once served. When Soviet tanks crushed the 1956 revolution he fled to England, finished a Cambridge doctorate, and reinvented himself at the London School of Economics as one of the sharpest minds in the philosophy of science. The dialectical Hegelian-Marxist formation he carried out of Budapest never quite left the Anglo-American philosopher he became.

Topics Imre Lakatos addresses

• methodology of scientific research programmes
• hard core
• protective belt
• negative heuristic
• positive heuristic
• progressive vs degenerating problemshifts
• the method of proofs and refutations
• monster-barring
• lemma-incorporation
• quasi-empirical mathematics
• rational reconstruction
• internal vs external history of science
• sophisticated methodological falsificationism
• Euler's polyhedra theorem
• the dialogue form
• the Euclidean deductivist style
• fallibilism in mathematics
• the logic of mathematical discovery
• conjecture and refutation
• counterexamples in mathematics
• heuristic vs axiomatic presentation
• the unit of appraisal problem
• Popper-0, Popper-1, Popper-2
• incommensurability

Converse with Imre Lakatos on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Imre Lakatos's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.