Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason [antikvár]

Analytic ContentsMagyar: Hungarian, Magyar magyaiázni: to explainIntroduction: Who Was Imie Lakatosi Ki volt Lakatos Imre? There are two Lakatoses. One is the outstanding successor of Karl Popper, editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science at the time of his death and key participant in the Anglo-American philosophy of science debates of the 1960s and 1970s. The other is a Hegelian who covertly introduced innovative ideas about history, reason, and criticism into Anglo-American philosophy. This combined dual philosophy makes reading Lakatos analogous to the 1920s' reading by Georg Lukács' in History and Class Consciousness of the buried yet substantive Hegelian architectonic in Karl Marx. The problem here is not that of understanding Lakatos but rather his marvelous philosophical, historical, and cross-cultural achievements. Several themes in Lakatos's work suggest an interpretation of his dual philosophy against the perverse irrationalism of Hungarian Stalinism between World War II and the emergence of the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution.Part I A Ma th ematical Bildungsrom an I. The Mathematical Present as HistoryLakatos's Proofs and Refutations is an unusual combination of mathematical history and an analysis of numerous nineteenth-century proofs of Leon-hard Euler's theorem about polyhedra. Lakatos metaphorically describes his complex narrative technique using Ernst Haeckel's "biogenetic law" that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," also a shorthand for Hegel's historio-graphical technique in The Phenomenology of Spirit. The strange historiography is Lakatos's means for devising a historical and fallible account of modern techniques of mathematical proof. He identifies formalism-meaning the complete identification of mathematics with some formalized, metamathematical representativeas the philosophical perspective he intends to challenge through his history.