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Imre Lakatos was a born to a Jewish family in Debrecen, Hungary. His given name at birth was Imre Lipschitz at birth, with Nazi rising to power and World War II controlled by chaos and most of his life, when he was in his final years at school.
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During the war years, Lakatos spent at the University of Debrecen and graduated in 1944 with a degree in math, physics and philosophy. To avoided the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews, Lakatos changed his surname to Molnar and he survived. His mother and his grandmother both died at Auschwitz’. -
He left Hungary in 1956, after World War II, Lakatos was an anti-fascist during the war getting him notice to be in a higher position in the communist community government. Which didn’t quite go well for Lakatos, he was dismissed from office and imprisoned in the early 1950s. Later on he became an exile in England after the freedom movement.
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Lakatos began to teach at the prestigious London School of Economics in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, for 14 years until his death. -
Lakatos fled to Austria and later reached England after the Soviet Union invaded Hungary. He received a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge; his doctoral thesis was entitled “Essays in the Logic of Mathematical Discovery.” (Wikipedia) -
In 1963 and 1964 through the British journal for the Philosophy of Science, Lakatos published a four scenario article series titled “Proofs and Refutations” has the impact it does because Lakatos knows the mathematics or as much of it as he chooses to know and can take the reader through it” (Worrall. J and Zahar. E, 2010). I believe this theory that Lakatos had was based off of mathematics and had similarities to Popper view on science. -
The central analytical concept which Lakatos uses, replacing Kuhn’s “paradigms,” is designated as a “research programme.” Which is common science, Lakatos gives thus expression a very particular meaning in his philosophical image of the growth of scientific knowledge.” Many philosophers have concluded that while Lakatos image of science does indeed have much to teach us. However Lakatos methodology of scientific research programmes has failed.” (Worrall. J and Currie. G, 1980).” -
He died a sudden death of a brain hemorrhage aged just at 51 in London, England.
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After his death, Paul Feyerabend another philosopher argued that his methodology was not a methodology at all, but merely “words that sound like the elements of a methodology.” He argued that Lakatos methodology was no different in practice from epistemology anarchism, Feyerabend’s own position.” (Wikipedia)