Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason

Kadvany John Kadvany

Description

The Hungarian emigre Imre Lakatos (1922-1974) earned a worldwide reputation through the influential philosophy of science debates involving Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Sir Karl Popper. In Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason John Kadvany shows that embedded in Lakatos's English-language work is a remarkable historical philosophy rooted in his Hungarian past. Below the surface of his life as an Anglo-American philosopher of science and mathematics, Lakatos covertly introduced novel transformations of Hegelian and Marxist ideas about historiography, skepticism, criticism, and rationality.Lakatos escaped Hungary following the failed 1956 Revolution. Before then, he had been an influential Communist intellectual and was imprisoned for years by the Stalinist regime. He also wrote a lost doctoral thesis in the philosophy of science and participated in what was criminal behavior in all but a legal sense. Kadvany argues that this intellectual and political past animates Lakatos's English-language philosophy, and that, whether intended or not, Lakatos integrated a penetrating vision of Hegelian ideas with rigorous analysis of mathematical proofs and controversial histories of science.Including new applications of Lakatos's ideas to the histories of mathematical logic and economics and providing lucid exegesis of many of Hegel's basic ideas, Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason is an exciting reconstruction of ideas and episodes from the history of philosophy, science, mathematics, and modern political history.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Western philosophy
• Philosophy of science

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 09 avril 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822380443
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason

Science and Cultural Theory

A series edited by Barbara Herrnstein Smith

and E. Roy Weintraub

Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason

Duke University Press

John Kadvany

Durham and London 2001

∫2001 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Typeset in Trump Mediaeval by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Portions of chapter 1 appeared in ‘‘A Mathematical Bild- ungsroman,’’History and Theory28, no. 1 (1989): 25–42. Portions of chapter 2 appeared in ‘‘The Mathematical Pres- ent as History,’’The Philosophical Forum26, no. 4 (1995): 263–87. Portions of chapter 4 appeared in ‘‘Reflections on the Legacy of Kurt Gödel: Mathematics, Skepticism, Post- modernism,’’The Philosophical Forum20, no. 3 (1989): 161–81. Portions of chapter 6 appeared in ‘‘Reason in His- tory: Paul Feyerabend’s Autobiography,’’Inquiry: An Inter- disciplinary Journal of Philosophy39, no. 1 (1996): 141–46. Portions of chapter 12 appeared in ‘‘Verso and Recto: An Es- say on Criticism and Social Change,’’Cultural Critique1, no. 1 (1985): 183–215.

Something I owe to the soil that grew—

More to the life that fed—

But most to Allah, Who gave me two,

Separate sides to my head.

—rudyard kipling,Kim

The genuine refutation must penetrate

the opponent’s stronghold and meet him

on his own ground; no advantage is gained by

attacking him somewhere else and

defeating him where he is not.

—g. w. f. hegelon Spinoza,Science of Logic

For Elena, Daniel, and Susan,

who continue to delight and enlighten

me every day.

1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12

Contents

Analytic Contents xi Preface xvii Introduction: Who Was Imre Lakatos?Ki volt Lakatos Imre?

I

|

A Mathematical Bildungsroman

21

The Mathematical Present as History 23 The Method of Proofs and Refutations 45 Mathematical Skepticism 85 Between Formal and Informal 111 Reason Inverted 131

II

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A Changing Logic of Scientific Discovery

145

Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, Lakatos 147 A Historiographical Toolkit 157 Contradiction and Hindsight 189 Reason in History 213 A Changing Logic 227 Classical Political Economy as a Research Programme

III

|

Magyarország/Hungary

263

Hungary 1956 and the Inverted World

Notes 317 Bibliography Index 371

359

265

237

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