-
Biography
Imre Lakatos was given the name Imre Lipschitz at birth, Lakatos born on November 9,1922 in Debrecen, Hungary. He was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science. -
Proofs and Refutations
His ‘Proofs and Refutations’ develops a novel account of mathematical discovery. It shows that counterexamples ‘refutations’ play an important role in mathematics as well as in science and argues that both proofs and theorems are gradually improved by searching for counterexamples and by systematic ‘proof analysis’. -
Philosophy of the empirical sciences
In 1964 Lakatos turned from the history and philosophy of mathematics to the history and philosophy of the empirical sciences. He organised a famous International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, held in London in 1965. Participants included Tarski, Quine, Carnap, Kuhn, and Popper. Lakatos sought to prove his point by analysing the Popper/Carnap debate and reversing the common verdict that Carnap had won and that Popper had lost. And here he faced a problem. -
Lakatos vs. Popper
The best-known of Lakatos’s “Conference Proceedings” is Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, which became an international best-seller. It contains Lakatos’s important paper “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes” (FMSRP). A briefer account of this methodology had already appeared (Lakatos 1968a), in which Lakatos distinguished dogmatic, naïve and sophisticated falsificationist positions, attributing them to “Popper0, Popper1 and Popper2”. -
Before he died
Lakatos and his colleague Spiro Latsis organized an international conference devoted entirely to historical case studies in Lakatos's methodology of research programmes in physical sciences and economics, to be held in Greece in 1974, and which still went ahead following Lakatos's death in February 1974. He remained at the London School of Economics until his sudden death in 1974 of a heart attack at the age of 51.
