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Education (1922–1961)
Lakatos' education was repeatedly interrupted by war. He completed his bachelor degree at the University of Debrecen in 1944, though his mother and grandmother died at Auschwitz, and after the war ended began postgrad study first in Budapest, then at the Moscow State University. He was imprisoned in Hungary 1950-1953, and after the Soviet invasion in 1956 fled to the UK where he completed a PhD at Cambridge.
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Larvor, Brendan. Lakatos: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. -
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Lifespan (1922–1974)
Lakatos was born in Debrecen, Hungary as Imre Lipschitz, though he changed his name twice: first to avoid Nazi persecution, and later in honor of Géza Lakatos (Larvor 1998). After the invasion of Hungary by the Soviets in 1956, Lakatos moved to England where he completed his education (ibid.). He took an academic position at LSE in 1960, and remained working there until his death in 1974, aged 51 (ibid.).
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Larvor, Brendan. Lakatos: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. -
Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes
In this work, Lakatos attempts to reconcile Popper's ideas of falsificationism with Kuhn's model of scientific progress, proposing a middle-way. Though apparently incompatible, Lakatos did not think these two explanations of scientific progress need be mutually exclusive.
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Lakatos, Imre. Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. In: Imre Lakatos & Alan Musgrave (eds.). Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. pp. 91-195. -
History of Science and its Rational Reconstructions
In this work, Lakatos emphasized the ability to reconstruct the history of science, as it actually happened, as the benchmark criterion for evaluating philosophies of science and theories of scientific rationality.
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Lakatos, Imre. History of Science and its Rational Reconstructions. In R. C. Buck & R. S. Cohen (eds.), PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 1971. pp. 91-108. -
“Science and Pseudoscience” BBC Radio Talk
Science and Pseudoscience was originally broadcast on the BBC in 1973, as part of The Open University Arts Course A303, ‘Problems of Philosophy’. The contents of the lecture was published posthumously, as the introduction to “The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes”.
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Lakatos, Imre. The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers Volume 1 (edited by J. Worrall and G. Currie). Cambridge University Press, 1978. -
Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery
In 1976, “Proofs and Refutations” was published posthumously. The book was based on earlier works, primarily the first three chapters of his doctoral thesis (Lakatos 1961), though the first chapter was based on a series of four papers published in the British Journal for Philosophy of Science between 1963 and 1964.
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Lakatos, Imre. Proofs and Refutations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Lakatos, Imre. Essays in the logic of mathematical discovery. PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1961.