Proofs and Research Programmes : Lakatos at 100

This open access book offers new insights into issues raised in philosophy of mathematics and in philosophy of science by Imre Lakatos. Lakatos was one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th Century, and his ideas remain important and relevant today. November 2022 saw the centenary of Lakatos’s birth, and the event was marked by an international conference held at the LSE – where Lakatos made his career after he had emigrated from Hungary to England. This volume consists of a selection of papers presented at the conference along with two additional contributions to debates about Lakatos’s continuing influence and importance.

Roman Frigg is a philosopher of science. His research interests lie in general philosophy of science and philosophy of physics, and he has published papers on scientific representation, modelling, statistical mechanics, randomness, chaos, climate change, quantum mechanics, complexity, probability, scientific realism, computer simulations, reductionism, confirmation, and the relation between art and science. His current work focuses on the nature of scientific models and theories, the foundations of statistical mechanics, and decision making under uncertainty. He is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of London and masters degrees both in theoretical physics and philosophy from the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the winner of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a permanent visiting professor in the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. He was the Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS) and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series (CATS) at LSE. He was associate editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and member of the steering committee of the European Philosophy of Science Association. He currently serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards.

J. McKenzie Alexander is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include evolutionary game theory, the evolution of morality, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of society. His most recent book, The Open Society as an Enemy, argues that, in the thirty years since the end of the Cold War, many of the core values of the open society have undergone a “value inversion” in the West: what were previously seen as virtues of the open society are now, by many people, seen as vices, dangers, or threats. In that book, he argues that this value-inversion is, with a few exceptions, mostly unwarranted. It aims to give a spirited philosophical defence of the open society, explaining why we should resist populist strands on both the left and right which threaten to undermine core aspects of the open society.

Laurenz Hudetz is a gymnasium teacher and philosopher based in Salzburg. He teaches mathematics, philosophy and psychology at Bundesgymnasium Zaunergasse. Previously, he served as an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. His areas of specialisation are philosophy of science and logic.

Miklos Redei is professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was a Visiting Fellow and Fulbright Scholar at the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh, U.S.A.; he was a Senior Resident Fellow at the Dibner Institute for History of Science and Technology at MIT; and he had visiting positions in the Foundations of Physics Group in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California at Irvine, U.S.A. His research area is philosophy and foundations of modern physics, especially quantum theory, and he worked on probabilistic causality and on foundations of classical and quantum probability. Redei also did extensive research on John von Neumann's life and work. He is the author of "Quantum logic in Algebraic Approach" (Kluwer, 1998); with two co-authors published the book "The Principle of the Common Cause" (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and edited several volumes, including "John von Neumann: Selected Letters" (American Mathematical Society and London Mathematical Society, 2015). He was chair, cochair and steering committee member of three major European Science Foundation grants that provided opportunities to develop philosophy of science in Europe in the period 2003-2013. He is a founding members of the European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA) and was elected to serve on the EPSA Steering Committee. In 2018 he received the Carl-Friedrich Siemens Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Lewis Ross is a faculty member at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the LSE. He joined the LSE as an Assistant Professor in 2021, having completed a PhD in the Arche Philosophical Research Centre at the University of St Andrews in 2019. His current work is primarily in epistemology and the philosophy of law, with his monograph The Philosophy of Legal Proof due out with Cambridge University Press in 2024. Within the philosophy of science, Dr Ross has worked on the notion of scientific progress, scientific understanding and the use of forensic evidence within the criminal trial.

John Worrall is professor Emeritus at LSE, where he did his PhD under the supervision of Imre Lakatos and the was member of faculty for over forty years. Worrall has made seminal contribution to the philosophical understanding of theory-change in science and he’s the one of progenitors of structural realism. More recently, his research has mostly focused on methodological and evidential issues in medicine particularly those concerned with clinical trials and “Evidence-Based Medicine”. He was for 10 years the Editor of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, has held Visiting Fellowships/Professorships at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Otago; and has given invited lectures around the world – in the USA and Canada, China, South America, Australia and New Zealand as well as Eastern and Western Europe. He was the founding Director of the LSE Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science and is a former President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science. He was made a Patron of Humanists UK in 2018. In 2019 he retired from LSE, becoming Emeritus Professor. In 2020 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate for his ‘major contributions to the Philosophy of Science’ by the University of A Coruña Spain.