The Lakatos Award is given annually for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, widely interpreted, in the form of a book published in English during the previous six years. The Award is in memory of Imre Lakatos and has been endowed by the Latsis Foundation. It is administered by the following committee: the Director of the London School of Economics (Chairman), Professor John Worrall (Convenor), and Professors Hans Albert, Nancy Cartwright, Adolf Grünbaum, Philip Kitcher, Alan Musgrave, and Michael Redhead. The Committee makes the Award on the advice of an independent and anonymous panel of selectors. The value of the Award is £10,000.
To take up an Award a successful candidate must visit the LSE and deliver a public lecture (naturally all relevant expenses are covered by the LSE). The Award, which may be shared if there are deemed to be two candidates of equal merit, has so far been won by Bas Van Fraassen and Hartry Field (1986), Michael Friedman and Philip Kitcher (1987), Michael Redhead (1988), John Earman (1989), Elliott Sober (1991), Peter Achinstein and Alexander Rosenberg (1993), Michael Dummett (1994), Lawrence Sklar (1995), Abner Shimony (1996), Jeffrey Bub and Deborah Mayo (1998), Brian Skyrms (1999), Judea Pearl (2001), Penelope Maddy (2002), Patrick Suppes (2003), Kim Sterelny (2004), James Woodward (2005), Harvey Brown and Hasok Chang (2006), Richard Healey (2008), Samir Okasha (2009), and Peter Godfrey-Smith (2010). No awards were made in 2007 and 2011.
John Worrall
Convenor, Lakatos Award Management Committee
About Imre Lakatos 1922-74
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Imre Lakatos in 1961 on the occasion of his Cambridge University doctoral award ceremony
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Imre Lakatos, who died in 1974 aged 51, had been Professor of Logic with special reference to the Philosophy of Mathematics at LSE since 1969. He joined the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in 1960 on Popper's invitation. Born in Debrecen in eastern Hungary in 1922, he graduated (in Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy) from Debrecen University in 1944. He then joined the underground resistance against the Nazi invasion of Hungary. (His mother, grandmother and uncle perished in Auschwitz.)
After the War he was active in the Communist Party and played a highly influential role in the Ministry of Education in Hungary's key period of radical educational reform for universal access to Higher Education on the basis of merit. He also completed a doctoral dissertation| at Debrecen University in 1947 on concept formation in science. But in 1950 he was arrested and spent the next three years as a political prisoner in Recsk labour camp without legal trial. After his release, shortly after the death of Stalin, he was given a position as librarian and then translator and researcher in the Hungarian Academy of Science by the head of its Institute of Mathematical Research, the internationally renowned mathematician Alfred Renyi, where he translated English language works in science and mathematics into Hungarian, including George Polya's renowned work on mathematical heuristics, How to Solve It.
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After the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, he left Hungary and went immediately to Vienna, and assisted by a Rockefeller fellowship recommended by Victor Kraft of the Vienna Circle, from there to Cambridge, England. At its Kings College he prepared his 1961 Cambridge doctoral thesis on the logic of mathematical discovery, the topic of whose central case study was personally suggested to him by Polya, and out of which grew his famous Proofs and Refutations CUP, 1976. Two volumes of Lakatos's Philosophical Papers|, edited by John Worrall & Gregory Currie, appeared in 1978, also with CUP. Two volumes of Lakatosian case studies in science and economics had appeared respectively in 1976 in Method and Appraisal in the Physical Sciences| ed. Howson and Method and Appraisal in Economics| ed. Latsis, both CUP, and Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos| eds. Cohen, Feyerabend & Wartofsky was published in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science series by Reidel that same year.
The last decade or so has seen an increasing number of books and articles on Lakatos and his philosophy, which have included the publication of his last annual LSE lectures on scientific method in Imre Lakatos & Paul Feyerabend: For and Against Method|, Motterlini (ed.), Chicago University Press, 1999. And in 2002 he was notably honoured by being the first philosopher to be the subject of a new series of philosophy books produced by the Institute Vienna Circle Appraising Lakatos: Mathematics, Methodology and the Man|, Kampis, Kvasz, & Stoltzner (eds), published by Kluwer. The book Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge|, Lakatos & Musgrave (eds), CUP, 1970, contains what has become publicly known as 'the Popper-Kuhn-Lakatos-Feyerabend debate' about the rationale of scientific research and theory change. It arose from the 1965 London University International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics and Science organised by Lakatos, and is nowadays a key set-text for students on a wide range of university courses.
The British Library of Political and Economic Science at the LSE houses his collection of personal papers from 1945 to 1974 and voluminous correspondence with 1000+ correspondents from 1956 to 1974 in The Lakatos Archive|. It includes his correspondence as Editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science from 1971 until his untimely death. Queries concerning the archive should be referred to the Archives Division (Document@lse.ac.uk|). Lakatos's 1973 Open University BBC Radio broadcast of his own 20 minute potted summary of his last LSE lecture course on scientific method, 'Science and Pseudoscience', also broadcast in Hungary by the BBC Hungarian World Service shortly after his death, can be heard on the LSE 'Lakatos|' Website, created in November 2002 to commemorate his 80th birthdate.