Imre Lakatos 1922 – 1974

Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian-British philosopher of mathematics and science. After surviving the Second World War in the Hungarian Communist underground and later being imprisoned by the same regime, he fled to England in 1956 and joined the London School of Economics, where he taught for the rest of his life. His Proofs and Refutations is a brilliant dialogue on the development of a mathematical proof, while The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes developed an alternative to Popper and Kuhn in which the unit of scientific appraisal is not a single theory but an evolving research programme.

Imre Lakatos was born in 1922 at Debrecen as Imre Lipschitz, into a Jewish Hungarian family that adopted the name Molnar to evade anti-Jewish legislation and, after the war, the more nationalist Lakatos. He studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at Debrecen, took his doctorate during the wartime occupation, was active in the Communist underground in 1944, and after 1945 rose in the Hungarian Ministry of Education before being imprisoned from 1950 to 1953 in a Stalinist purge.

He fled Hungary in the wake of the 1956 uprising, settled in Cambridge to work with R. B. Braithwaite, took a second doctorate at King's College, and from 1960 taught at the London School of Economics, where he succeeded to Karl Popper's chair in philosophy of science in 1969. His Proofs and Refutations (1963-1964) is a philosophical dialogue on the dynamics of mathematical discovery; his methodology of scientific research programmes was set out in the long essays of the late 1960s and posthumously gathered in The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (1978).

Lakatos rationalized scientific change without Kuhnian relativism, distinguishing progressive and degenerating problemshifts within research programmes structured by an inviolable hard core and a flexible protective belt. His debate with Kuhn and Feyerabend in the late 1960s shaped the philosophy of science of the next decades. He died of a heart attack at London in February 1974.