Editing Imre Lakatos (section)

==Life==
Lakatos was born Imre (Avrum) Lipsitz to a [[Jew]]ish family in [[Debrecen]], [[Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946)|Hungary]], in 1922. He received a degree in mathematics, [[physics]], and [[philosophy]] from the [[University of Debrecen]] in 1944. In March 1944 the [[Operation Margarethe|Germans invaded Hungary]], and Lakatos along with Éva Révész, his then-girlfriend and subsequent wife, formed soon after that event a [[Marxist]] resistance group. In May of that year, the group was joined by Éva Izsák, a 19-year-old Jewish antifascist activist. Lakatos, considering that there was a risk that she would be captured and forced to betray them, decided that her duty to the group was to commit suicide. Subsequently, a member of the group took her to Debrecen and gave her [[cyanide]].<ref name=SEP>{{cite encyclopedia |url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/ |title=Imre Lakatos |encyclopedia=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|year=2021 }}</ref>

During the occupation, Lakatos avoided [[Nazi]] persecution of Jews by changing his surname to Molnár.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=X80rBgAAQBAJ&q=tibor |author=Brendan Larvor |date=2013 |title=Lakatos: An Introduction |page=3 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=9781134765140 |quote=He assumed the name 'Molnár Tibor' during the time in the resistance group}}</ref> His mother and grandmother were murdered in [[Auschwitz]]. He changed his surname once again to ''Lakatos'' (Locksmith) in honor of [[Géza Lakatos]].

After the war, from 1947, he worked as a senior official in the Hungarian ministry of education. He also continued his education with a PhD at Debrecen University awarded in 1948 and also attended [[György Lukács]]'s weekly Wednesday afternoon private seminars. He also studied at the [[Moscow State University]] under the supervision of [[Sofya Yanovskaya]] in 1949. When he returned, however, he found himself on the losing side of internal arguments within the [[Hungarian Working People's Party|Hungarian communist party]] and was imprisoned on charges of [[Marxist revisionism|revisionism]] from 1950 to 1953. More of Lakatos's activities in Hungary after World War II have recently become known. In fact, Lakatos was a hardline [[Stalinist]] and, despite his young age, had an important role between 1945 and 1950 (his own arrest and jailing) in building up the Communist rule, especially in cultural life and the academia, in Hungary.<ref>Bandy 2010.{{page needed|date=April 2016}}</ref>

After his release, Lakatos returned to academic life, doing mathematical research and translating [[George Pólya]]'s ''[[How to Solve It]]'' into Hungarian. Still nominally a communist, his political views had shifted markedly, and he was involved with at least one dissident student group in the lead-up to the [[1956 Hungarian Revolution]].

After the [[Soviet Union]] invaded Hungary in November 1956, Lakatos fled to [[Vienna]] and later reached England. He lived there for the rest of his life however he never achieved a British citizenship.<ref>György Kampis, L. Kvasz, Michael Stöltzner (eds.), ''Appraising Lakatos: Mathematics, Methodology, and the Man'', Springer, 2013, p. 296.</ref> He received a PhD in philosophy in 1961 from the [[University of Cambridge]]; his [[doctoral thesis]] was entitled ''Essays in the Logic of Mathematical Discovery'', and his doctoral advisor was [[R. B. Braithwaite]]. The book ''[[Proofs and Refutations|Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery]]'', published after his death, is based on this work.

In 1960, he was appointed to a position in the [[London School of Economics]] (LSE), where he wrote on the [[philosophy of mathematics]] and the [[philosophy of science]]. The LSE philosophy of science department at that time included [[Karl Popper]], [[Joseph Agassi]] and [[John Oulton Wisdom|J. O. Wisdom]].<ref>{{citation |page=42 |title=Gallery of Scholars: A Philosopher's Recollections |volume=13 |series=Philosophy and education |first=Israel |last=Scheffler |publisher=Springer |year=2007 |isbn=9781402027109 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=q_UI5cC3QlsC&pg=PA42}}.</ref> It was Agassi who first introduced Lakatos to Popper under the rubric of his applying a [[Fallibilism|fallibilist]] methodology of [[conjecture]]s and [[refutation]]s to mathematics in his Cambridge PhD thesis.

With co-editor [[Alan Musgrave]], he edited the often cited ''Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge'', the ''Proceedings'' of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965. Published in 1970, the 1965 Colloquium included well-known speakers delivering papers in response to [[Thomas Samuel Kuhn|Thomas Kuhn's]] ''[[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]]''.

In January 1971, he became editor of the ''[[British Journal for the Philosophy of Science]]'', which J.&nbsp;O. Wisdom had built up before departing in 1965, and he continued as editor until his death in 1974,<ref>See Lakatos's 5 Jan 1971 letter to Paul Feyerabend pp. 233–234 in Motterlini's 1999 ''For and Against Method''.</ref> after which it was then edited jointly for many years by his LSE colleagues [[John W. N. Watkins]] and [[John Worrall (philosopher)|John Worrall]], Lakatos's ex-research assistant. 

Lakatos and his colleague [[Spiro Latsis]] organized an international conference in Greece in 1975, and went ahead despite his death. It was devoted entirely to historical case studies in Lakatos's methodology of research programmes in physical sciences and economics. These case studies in such as Einstein's relativity programme, [[Augustin-Jean Fresnel|Fresnel]]'s wave theory of light and [[neoclassical economics]], were published by Cambridge University Press in two separate volumes in 1976, one devoted to physical sciences and Lakatos's general programme for rewriting the history of science, with a concluding critique by his great friend [[Paul Feyerabend]], and the other devoted to economics.<ref>These were respectively ''Method and Appraisal in the Physical Sciences: The Critical Background to Modern Science 1800–1905'' by Colin Howson (ed.) and ''Method and Appraisal in Economics'' by Spiro J. Latsis (ed.).</ref>

He remained at LSE until his sudden death in 1974 of a heart attack<ref>{{cite journal |author=[[Donald A. Gillies]] |title=Review. Matteo Motterlini (ed). Imre Lakatos. Paul K. Feyerabend. ''Sull'orlo della scienza: pro e contro il metodo''. (On the threshold of Science: for and against method) |journal=The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science |volume=47 |number=3 |date=Sep 1996 |jstor=687992 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/687992}}</ref> at the age of 51. The [[Lakatos Award]] was set up by the school in his memory. His last lectures along with some correspondance were published in [[Against Method]]. His last lectures along with parts of his correspondence with [[Paul Feyerabend]] have been published in ''For and Against Method''.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Feyerabend |first1=Paul |url=https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7208/9780226467030/html |title=For and Against Method |last2=Lakatos |first2=Imre |chapter=For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence |publisher=[[University of Chicago Press]] |year=1999 |editor-last=Motterlini |editor-first=Matteo |location=Chicago|doi=10.7208/9780226467030 |doi-broken-date=1 November 2024 |isbn=9780226467030 }}</ref>