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Born
Imre Lakatos was born Imre (Avrum) Lipschitz to a Jewish family in Debrecen, Hungary in 1922. -
Education and World War 2
He received a degree in mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the University of Debrecen in 1944. In March 1944 the Germans invaded Hungary. During the occupation, Lakatos avoided Nazi persecution of Jews by changing his name to Imre Molnár. His mother and grandmother died in Auschwitz. He changed his surname once again to Lakatos (Locksmith) in honor of Géza Lakatos a Hungarian General. -
Post World War 2
After the war, from 1947, he worked as a senior official in the Hungarian ministry of education. He also continued his education with a PhD at Debrecen University awarded in 1948, and also attended György Lukács's weekly Wednesday afternoon private seminars. He also studied at the Moscow State University under the supervision of Sofya Yanovskaya in 1949. -
Imprisonment
Lakatos found himself on the losing side of internal arguments within the Hungarian communist party and was imprisoned on charges of revisionism from 1950 to 1953. More of Lakatos' activities in Hungary after World War II have recently become known. [1]- Larvor, Brendan. Lakatos An Introduction. Taylor and Francis, 2013.
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England
After the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in November 1956, Lakatos fled to Vienna, and later reached England. He received a PhD in philosophy in 1961 from the University of Cambridge. -
Research programmes.
Lakatos's second major contribution to the philosophy of science was his model of the 'research programme',[1] which he formulated in an attempt to resolve the perceived conflict between Popper's falsificationism and the revolutionary structure of science described by Kuhn. 1.Lakatos, Imre. (1970). "Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes." In: Lakatos, Musgrave eds. (1970), pp. 91–195. -
Death
London,England. He was editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. -
Proofs and Refutations
A central theme of this book is that definitions are not carved in stone, but often have to be patched up in the light of later insights, in particular failed proofs. At the end of the Introduction, Lakatos explains that his purpose is to challenge formalism in mathematics, and to show that informal mathematics grows by a logic of "proofs and refutations". -
Pseudoscience
Lakatos's own key examples of pseudoscience were Ptolemaic astronomy, Immanuel Velikovsky's planetary cosmogony, Freudian psychoanalysis, 20th century Soviet Marxism, Lysenko's biology, Niels Bohr's Quantum Mechanics post-1924, astrology, psychiatry, sociology, neoclassical economics, and Darwin's theory.
