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Lakatos' Early Adulthood
As a Stalinist revolutionary and a leader of a communist cell, he engaged in grim activities on behalf of the communist regime. A powerful job in the Ministry of Education, he vetted university teachers for their political reliability. Served the secret police as an informant by keeping tabs on his friends and comrades. Many that knew and loved the later Lakatos, these facts are difficult to digest, but lack relevancy to assessing his philosophy, largely the product of his British years. -
The Popper Influence
Imre Lakatos made a return to academia after a three year incarceration by the Hungarian communist party for charges of 'revisionism'. He fled to Vienna then England after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, where he received his doctorate of philosophy from Cambridge University, which was during the same time Karl Popper was teaching at the LSE philosophy of science department. Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics was inspired by Popper's theory of knowledge. -
Proofs and Refutations
Lakatos published a four part entry in the British Journal of Philosophy of Science, which, was based on his doctoral thesis and expounded upon his view of mathematical progress. The concept centered around definitions not being carved in stone, but which could be 'patched up' later as new insights emerge. He refused to publish as a book due to his idea of much left to be updated. Unfortunately he did not live to publish his work, in 1976, two years after his death, the work appeared as a book. -
Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes
Later in life, Lakatos became dissent from Popper's influence as he published his second major contribution to philosophy 'MSRP'. This work radically revised Popper's Demarcation Criterion between science and non-science, which led to the theory of scientific rationality. Lakatos acknowledged Popper’s criterion, as far too restrictive, since it ruled out too much of everyday scientific practice (including the value-judgments of the scientific elite) as unscientific and irrational. -
Insight into Lakatos mindset
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Legacy
Lakatos' enduring works such as 'Proofs and Refutations' and 'Research Programmes' had and maintain a tremendous influence on philosophical mathematics and science to date. They guide the of most modern-day scientific research. These works have elevated him as a one of the most (if not the most) important philosopher of the 20th Century.
