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Lakatos’ philosophical work in Hungary

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Abstract

This paper attempts to present a general picture of the most important philosophical elements found in the Hungarian writings of Imre Lakatos, later the famous philosopher of science in England, with a focus on his views on science and its social context. In the first section, Lakatos’ life in Hungary is summarized, with a special emphasis on those few years when most of the Hungarian works were written. The second section offers a list of his Hungarian publications, each item accompanied by a brief description. Then we examine the lost doctoral dissertation and its possible contents as reconstructed from the reports of the readers and the published texts. Finally we identify the main philosophical sources the young Lakatos could have used, and give a summary of his basic views on science.

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Notes

  1. The debate was very similar to the simultaneous ‘Lukács debate’ where the celebrated philosopher was subjected to ideological attacks. Lakatos is believed to have contributed to a probably proposed but never actually initiated ‘Révai debate’ during his Eötvös Collegium years.

  2. In Kampis et al. (2002, pp. 375–76), the page number given (13) is wrong—the newspaper was printed on 12 pages.

  3. Note that it is the only review by Lakatos on something that is neither originally Hungarian nor a Hungarian translation (as in paper [8]).

  4. See his opposition to the ideological uses of science in paper [5]. The fight against “Jeans-type physical idealism” as a timely project is mentioned in paper [1] as well (Lakatos 1946a, p. 76).

  5. The reason is clear to Lakatos, since Stebbing’s—necessarily partial—view is also determined by her social position, the position of a “radical petty bourgeois” (p. 33).

  6. In this paper Lakatos often uses Goethe’s criticism of Newton’s theory of colors as an example. It seems that he became enthusiastic by reading a published talk given by Werner Heisenberg in Budapest in April 1941 (Heisenberg 1941). In Lakatos (1947e, p. 360n) (translation: Lakatos 2002, p. 369, no.19) Lakatos mistakenly gives the year 1943.

  7. I do not give references to paper [3] independently, since I take it as a part of paper [9] here.

  8. The hint about the impossibility of objectivity in science, given by Karácsony, seems to contradict Lakatos’ terminology. E.g. in paper [9] he uses the word ‘objective’ ten times without qualification. Naturally, the context of his terminology is Marxism. He describes some scientific concepts as “objective, discovering the essence of nature, therefore independent of [their] manifestation in the motion of commodities” (Lakatos 1947e, p. 360, transl. 363, emphasis in the original). At the end of the paper (Ibid. 369, transl. 368) he hopes “that the examination of the subjective, sociologically determined aspects of scientific concept-building can only support us in the belief that the objective aspects play an ever larger role in the development of science; the nature independent of human mind is reflected more and more completely”. Objectivity thus seems to be some kind of independence from the social superstructure, which is the goal of science (never to be reached completely, but present to an ever larger extent).

  9. Although he argues against external authoritarian intrusions into science, e.g. in Lakatos (1980a), including Stalin’s “thought that proletarian, socialist science was superior to bourgeois science,” who therefore “sent bourgeois geneticists to die in concentration camps” (Ibid. 257). He gives a longer summary of his “ghastly” memories of state control over Hungarian science in Lakatos (1980b, p. 247).

  10. As he puts it in Lakatos (1980a, p. 258, emphasis in the original): “In my view, science, as such, has no social responsibility. In my view it is society that has a responsibility...“ This is in line with his earlier distinction between science and its social ideologies, but while these ideologies fell in the circle of his interests in his Hungarian years, later they seem to have lost their appeal to him.

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Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Alex Bellamy and László Ropolyi for their helpful conversations. The research was supported by the national OTKA funds 62455 and 69249, and the Bolyai Research Scholarship.

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  1. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Pf. 32, Budapest, 1518, Hungary

    Gábor Kutrovátz

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Kutrovátz, G. Lakatos’ philosophical work in Hungary. Stud East Eur Thought 60, 113–133 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-008-9049-8

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