Imre Lakatos and the guises of reason (Q2723582)

In 1957 Imre Lakatos fled from Hungary to England. In the 1960s he became famous with the publication of 'Proofs and Refutations' (based on his Cambridge Ph. D. thesis and reprinted by Cambridge Univ. Press (1976; Zbl 0334.00022)) in which he argued that mathematics is not a collection of infallible truths developing in a cumulative way, but, that on the contrary, mathematical theories are constantly being refuted and replaced by others. Lakatos views can be seen as an extension to mathematics of Karl Popper's work with respect to scientific theories. At the end of the 1960s, in a reaction to Thomas Kuhn's `The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' Lakatos developed his `Methodology of scientific research programmes' [cf. Cambridge Univ. Press (1978; Zbl 0373.02002)]. Both the methodology of proofs and refutations and the methodology of scientific research programmes are attempts to capture the rationality of the development of mathematics and science. Usually Lakatos' work is rightly interpreted as part of Anglo-Saxon philosophy [cf. \textit{T. Koetsier}, Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics. A historical approach. North-Holland (1991; Zbl 0743.00017)]. Yet, before Lakatos came to England, he had spent the first 34 years of his life in Hungary. He had been active in the communist party and he had been in a communist jail for three years for reasons that remain unknown. Moreover, he had studied the works of Marx and Engels and had undergone the influence of the influential Hungarian marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEIn this fascinating book the author attempts in considerable detail to relate in various ways Lakatos' Anglo-Saxon philosophical work to his Hungarian past. Lakatos had read Lukacs's `History and Class Consciousness' and acquired a Hegelian-Marxist view of science: the views of a scientific community can only be understood as a historical cathegory and as part of a dialectical development. Moreover, Lukacs's `The Destruction of Reason' and the practice of Hungarian Stalinism had shown him how the idea of criticism building knowledge through solutions to contradictions could be easily perverted. Stalinism reduced dialectics to a forced admitting of one's errors often before being eliminated. For example, Kadvany points out that Lakatos's method of proofs and refutations is strikingly similar to Hegel's phenomenology of the spirit; the neutralisation of a counter-example by means of the method of lemma-incorporation is `aufheben' in the Hegelian sense of the word. Hegel described his own philosophy as the final stage in the history of philosophy. Analogously Lakatos described his methodology of scientific research programmes as the natural outcome of a dialectical development in which successively more powerful methodologies succeed each other. Lakatos was in fact a ``classic Hungarian Stalinist intellectual of the postwar area'' (p. xvi). Kadvany's reconstruction of the intellectual development of Lakatos' s thinking is very convincing: it is clear that it is necessary for a full understanding of Lakatos's philosophical work to take his Hungarian past into account. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINETwo chapters of the book are devoted to new rational reconstructions along Lakatosian lines. Chapter 4 contains a history of `monster barring' and `lemma-incorporation' for Gödel's second incompleteness theorem. Chapter 11 argues that Marxist economics qualified as a research programme and as such must be considered as scientific from a Lakatosian point of view. The last chapter of the book is an intriguing attempt to understand Hungarian history between World War II and the failed revolution of 1956 by means of Lakatos's philosophy.