Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason

by Kadvany, John David; Smith, Barbara Herrnstein; Weintraub, E. Roy

• ISBN13: 9780822326601
• ISBN10: 0822326604
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

The Hungarian émigré Imre Lakatos (1922-1974) earned a worldwide reputation through the influential philosophy of science debates involving Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Sir Karl Popper. In Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason John Kadvany shows that embedded in Lakatos's English-language work is a remarkable historical philosophy rooted in his Hungarian past. Below the surface of his life as an Anglo-American philosopher of science and mathematics, Lakatos covertly introduced novel transformations of Hegelian and Marxist ideas about historiography, skepticism, criticism, and rationality.Lakatos escaped Hungary following the failed 1956 Revolution. Before then, he had been an influential Communist intellectual and was imprisoned for years by the Stalinist regime. He also wrote a lost doctoral thesis in the philosophy of science and participated in what was criminal behaviour in all but a legal sense. Kadvany argues that this intellectual and political past animates Lakatos's English-language philosophy, and whether intended or not, that Lakatos integrated a penetrating vision of Hegelian ideas with rigorous analysis of mathematical proofs and controversial histories of science.Including new applications of Lakatos's ideas to the histories of mathematical logic and economics and providing lucid exegesis of many of Hegel's basic ideas, Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason is an exciting reconstruction of ideas and episodes from the history of philosophy, science, mathematics, and modern political history.

Table of Contents

Analytic Contents

Preface

A Mathematical Bildungsroman

The Mathematical Present as History

The Method of Proofs and Refutations

Mathematical Skepticism

Between Formal and Informal

Reason Inverted

A Changing Logic of Scientific Discovery

Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, Lakatos

An Historiographical Toolkit

Contradiction and Hindsight

Reason in History

A Changing Logic

Classical Political Economy as a Research Programme

Magyarország / Hungary

Hungary 1956 and the Inverted World

Notes

Bibliography

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