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Born November 9, 1922 in Debrecen, Hungary. Imre Lakatos' parents split when he was young so he was largely raised by his grandmother and mother.
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Lakatos graduated from the university of Debrecen with a degree in Physics, Mathematics, and Philosophy.
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Following many years of communist activities. Lakatos' career really started when he was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Karl Popper’s department at the London School of Economics
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Received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Cambridge; his doctoral thesis was entitled Essays in the Logic of Mathematical Discovery
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Imre Lakatos' first major work Proofs and Refutations is a critique of “formalist” philosophies of mathematics. This work counters Euclidian deductions, stating that proofs are deductions from well-defined premises are the end-points of an evolutionary process. This is a direct comparison to Poppers theories on science. That theories are evolutionary. And that refutations or counter-arguments are an important aspect of the evolution.
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In this writing Lakatos' labels scientific theories not as "true" or "false", but as progressive and degenerative. More akin to Thomas Kuhns Paradigm shifts. If a programme is deemed degenerative then it means that its successive theories are not theoretically progressive or empirically progressive. This half of this video explains Lakatos' hardcore data: youtube
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At the age of 51 Lakatos' suffered a heart attack and passed away.
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Even after his untimely death one more work was published. Co-authored with Elie Zahar, this work explains why the methodology of scientific research programmes is used as justification to the Copernican Revolution as a rational process to dethrone the Ptolemy geocentric theory.