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Chapters: Imre Lakatos. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 20. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Imre Lakatos (November 9, 1922 February 2, 1974) was a philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his methodology of scientific research programmes. Lakatos was born Imre (Avrum) Lipsitz to a Jewish family in Debrecen, Hungary in 1922. He received a degree in mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the University of Debrecen in 1944. He avoided Nazi persecution of Jews by changing his name to Imre Molnár. His mother and grandmother died in Auschwitz. He became an active communist during the Second World War. He changed his last name 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 communist party and was imprisoned on charges of revisionism from 1950 to 1953. More of Lakatos' activities in Hungary after World War II have recently become known. 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 i...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=38455 ... Read more

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Chapters: Mikhail Gorbachev, Andrei Sakharov, C. A. R. Hoare, Anton Chekhov, Imre Lakatos, Andrey Kolmogorov, Wassily Kandinsky, Vladimir Arnold, Lev Vygotsky, Sergei Bodrov, Jr., Grigory Barenblatt, Pavel Samuilovich Urysohn, Igor Tamm, Maxim Kontsevich, Raisa Gorbachyova, Pafnuty Chebyshev, Ruslan Khasbulatov, Mikhail Lavrentyev, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Israel Gelfand, Anna Politkovskaya, Yuri Knorozov, Ion Iliescu, Andrey Korotayev, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Oleg Deripaska, Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Herzen, Yegor Gaidar, Andrei Amalrik, Aleksandr Zinovyev, Dmitri Shepilov, Dmitry Galkovsky, Boris Akunin, Sergei Bulgakov, Lev Shestov, Vasily Grossman, Nitipoom Navaratna, Marina Karaseva, Pavel Florensky, Varlam Shalamov, Yevgeny Primakov, Alexander Kuzemsky, Vladimir N. Beneshevich, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Vladimir Solovyov, Yevgenia Albats, Vitaly Ginzburg, Alexander Vassiliev, Alexander Kronrod, Ivan Ilyin, Ivan Mozzhukhin, Olga Arsenievna Oleinik, Rostislav Grigorchuk, Sergei Yesenin, Natalia Morar, Lyudmila Zhivkova, Nikolai Luzin, Mstislav Keldysh, Maximilian Voloshin, Nino Burjanadze, Vasily Aleksanyan, Koki Ishii, Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova-Dashkova, Grigory Margulis, Alexander Oparin, Dmitri Bondarenko, Aleksandr Griboyedov, Mykola Azarov, Sergey Yablonsky, Eduard Shpolsky, Zurab Noghaideli, Dmitry Rogozin, Vladimir Damgov, Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson, Sergei Kovalev, Olia Lialina, Sergei Stanishev, Antonio Maria Costa, Alexander Razborov, Vladimir Krivchenkov, Mikael Nalbandian, Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov, Elena Kostioukovitch, Vadim Zvjaginsev, Alexander Kazhdan, Ivan Kireyevsky, Vladimir Drinfel'd, Valery Bryusov, Pavel K. Oshchepkov, Leonid Pasternak, Kazimieras Garšva, Evgeny Velikhov, Paul Sophus Epstein, Lev Gudkov, Ion Niculiţă, Vladislav Listyev, Tatyana Zaslavskaya, Aleksander Ostrovsky, Ivan Goncharov, Hasan Bey Zardabi, Sergei Novikov, Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Mikhail Chumakov, Ilya Darevsky, Nikolai Bryukha...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=20979 ... Read more

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Les achats comprennent une adhésion à l'essai gratuite au club de livres de l'éditeur, dans lequel vous pouvez choisir parmi plus d'un million d'ouvrages, sans frais. Le livre consiste d'articles Wikipedia sur : Georg Lukács, Ágnes Heller, Imre Lakatos, Johannes Sambucus, Thomas Molnar, Michael Polanyi, Miklós Gáspár Tamás, Anthony de Jasay, Imre Toth. Non illustré. Mises à jour gratuites en ligne. Extrait : Georg Lukács ou György Lukács (13 avril 1885 - 4 juin 1971) est un philosophe marxiste et un sociologue de la littérature hongrois d'expression allemande. György Lukács naît dans une famille de la bourgeoisie juive de Budapest. Il fait des études de philosophie en Allemagne et obtient son doctorat ès lettres en 1906. Il devient l'assistant de Max Weber. En 1917, il adhère au marxisme et entre au Parti communiste. Il participe à la République des conseils de Hongrie de 1919 (dirigée par Béla Kun, dont il est commissaire à l'Instruction). Après l'échec de ce soulèvement, il s'exile en Autriche, puis à Berlin, et enfin à Moscou à partir de 1933. Il revient en Hongrie en 1945, et devient député et professeur de philosophie. Il est ministre de la Culture dans le gouvernement d'Imre Nagy en 1956. Après la répression de l'Insurrection de Budapest, il est exilé en Roumanie, mais peut revenir en Hongrie en 1957. Il se consacre alors aux questions d'esthétique et de théorie littéraire. Lukács est le précurseur des études sociologiques sur la littérature romanesque. Il a su adopter une perspective qui replace l'œuvre d'art dans son contexte social et historique qu'il s'efforce de reconstituer et d'analyser. Il fut également un farouche défenseur du réalisme en littérature, répudiant notamment le modernisme incarné par des auteurs tels que Kafka, Joyce ou Beckett. Cette partie de son œuvre trouve des prolongements dans celle du sociologue Wolf Lepenies. Il a été lauréat du Goethe-Preis décerné par la ville de Francfort-sur-le-Main en ...http://booksllc.net/?l=fr ... Read more

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"Chocolate and Chess" is a Holocaust story with a twist that shocked even Elie Wiesel, a Cold War story, with spy vs. spy intrigue, and, alas, also very much a human story. It reads like a thriller, but it is the true tale of Imre Lakatos, the brilliant philosopher of the London School of Economics, who was a mystery to colleagues, friends and lovers - and to Britain's MI5. Surviving the Holocaust, he wanted to start anew and devoted his energies to building the Hungarian Communist Party. Surviving torture and incarceration by his comrades, he left for England for another fresh start. But the secret services of countries on both sides of the Cold War divide remained interested in him and England denied him citizenship despite the backing of esteemed colleagues like Karl Popper. Based on previously classified Western counterintelligence and Hungarian secret police archives, this book endeavors to fill gaps in the knowledge of both cognoscenti and counterspies. ... Read more

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Chapters: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, George Lakoff, Gottlob Frege, Imre Lakatos, Haskell Curry, Hilary Putnam, Proclus, Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, Alain Badiou, Bertrand Russell's Views on Philosophy, Michael Dummett, Stephan Körner, John Lucas, Gerrit Mannoury, Paul Benacerraf, Stewart Shapiro, Crispin Wright, Jaakko Hintikka, Hao Wang, Colin Mclarty, James Franklin, Sofya Yanovskaya, Penelope Maddy, Horace Romano Harré, David Corfield, Michael Resnik, Donald A. Gillies, Jody Azzouni, Paul Ernest, Reuben Hersh, Hartry Field, Charles Parsons, Mark Steiner, Geoffrey Hellman, Stephen Yablo, James Robert Brown. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 248. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in the areas of logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Described by his mentor and colleague Bertrand Russell as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating," Wittgenstein is considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Instrumental in inspiring two of the century's principal philosophical movements, logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy, he is considered one of the most important figures in analytic philosophy. According to an end of the century poll, professional philosophers rank both his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (1953) among the top five most important books in twentieth-century philosophy, the latter standing out as "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations." Wittgenstei...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=17741 ... Read more

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Imre Lakatos (1922--1974) was one of the protagonists inshaping the "new philosophy of science". More than 25 years after hisuntimely death, it is time for a critical re-evaluation of his ideas.His main theme of locating rationality within the scientific processappears even more compelling today, after many historical case studieshave revealed the cultural and societal elements within scientificpractices. Recently there has been, above all, an increasing interestin Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics, which emphasises heuristics andmathematical practice over logical justification. But suitablemodifications of his approach are called for in order to make itapplicable to modern axiomatised theories. Pioneering historical research in England and Hungary has unearthedhitherto unknown facts about Lakatos' personal life, his wartimeactivities and his involvement in the political developments ofpost-war Europe. From a communist activist committed to GyorgyiLukacs' thinking, Lakatos developed into a staunch anti-Marxistwho found his intellectual background in Popper's criticalrationalism. The volume also publishes for the first time a part ofhis Debrecen Ph.D. thesis and it is concluded by a bibliography of hisHungarian writings. ... Read more

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In this book, which is both a philosophical and historiographical study, the author investigates the fallibility and the rationality of mathematics by means of rational reconstructions of developments in mathematics. The initial chapters are devoted to a critical discussion of Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics. In the remaining chapters several episodes in the history of mathematics are discussed, such as the appearance of deduction in Greek mathematics and the transition from Eighteenth-Century to Nineteenth-Century analysis. The author aims at developing a notion of mathematical rationality that agrees with the historical facts. A modified version of Lakatos' methodology is proposed. The resulting constructions show that mathematical knowledge is fallible, but that its fallibility is remarkably weak. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Useless
To the limited extent that this book has to do with Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics it is an unsympathetic and unimaginative summary of some of Lakatos' views interspersed with Koetsier's incompetent extrapolations and misrepresentations.

An example of Koetsier's unreasonable extrapolations is his claim that "Lakatos's views apparently imply that nothing in mathematics is self-evident. Self-evidence in mathematics is an illusion." (p. 24). This statement immediately follows a quotation from Lakatos, Papers, II, p. 42, where Lakatos comes nowhere close to saying anything of the sort.

Another utterly absurd observation is that "Lakatos's notion of 'problem-shift' is similar to Brouwer's notion of 'jump from goal to means'" (p. 64). The latter is a quotation from Brouwer's "Life, Art and Mysticism", which Koetsier quotes as if it was a scholarly work containing "notions" for analysing the development of science when in fact it is a rebellious student manifesto that has nothing at all to do with science or mathematics. The quotation in question in fact occurs in the context of Brouwer's condemnation of modern industrial society.

An example of Koetsier's foolish misrepresentations is his critique of Lakatos' "Cauchy and the Continuum." Here Koetsier misconstrues Lakatos' standpoint by overemphasising the Robinsonian non-standard analysis aspect. Lakatos explicitly concluded that the Robinsonian interpretation is not correct and that its role was that of "a powerful stimulus" (Papers, II, p. 57). Lakatos' argument instead rests ultimately on the claim that Cauchy rejected the canonical counterexample since it diverges at x=1/n (cf. pp. 85-86). Lakatos may very well be wrong, but Koetsier's discussion does not help us decide since it misses Lakatos' point entirely.

The bulk of the book is devoted to Koetsier's proposed improvement on Lakatos: a "methodology of mathematical research traditions" (MMRT). This is amateur philosophy at its worst, complete with ambiguities spewing out its ears and feeble attempts to support it by pretentious terminology that is both ill-defined and never actually used. The latter pillars are often erected on pseudo-Laktosian sand, with pompous distinctions, never employed in the case studies, between e.g. "heuristic progress" (producing conjectures) and "absolute progress" (proving conjectures). It is no wonder that this distinction is never used later, as it is virtually vacuous (no tradition has had only heuristic progress). Koetsier's entire theory in the end amounts to a list of properties that are deemed desirable in a mathematical theory (p. 170), and the dictum that mathematicians should assign a "tradition" a value "proportional to its expected progress", as defined, within a margin of error of fifty-eight thousand miles, by this extremely vague list.

Koetsier's case studies never actually use his MMRT theory in any substantial way (how could they since this theory is all fluff?). One case study is a long and rambling and previously published survey of the history of the theorem on the equality of mixed partial derivatives. Presumably having been forced to include it to meet his page quota, Koetsier is desperately grasping for a way to connect it to his MMRT theory. But this time he does not have the imagination to come up even with fluff. Instead he establishes the desired connection by simply maintaining that the mere existence of research traditions provide resounding proof for his theory: "The different eighteenth century version of the interchangeability theorem ... support the rational reconstruction on the basis of the MMRT ... in the sense that they show the unity of the formalist tradition." (p. 249).

The book is also packed with typos and clumsy formulations. The list on p. 170 referred to above, for example, is said to be "undoubtedly not incomplete", when obviously the opposite is meant. As usual the fat cats at Elsevier want to stick the profits from their ridiculously overpriced books in their own pockets instead of hiring descent proof readers. ... Read more