The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is pleased to announce the 2025 Lakatos Award winner Mazviita Chirimuuta, who receives the award for her book “The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience”(MIT Press, 2024). Congratulations!

The Lakatos Award was made possible by a generous endowment from the Latsis Foundation, in memory of the former LSE professor Imre Lakatos. It is administered by an international Management Committee, which is organised from the LSE but entirely independent of LSE’s Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method. The Committee decides the outcome of the Award competition on the basis of advice from an anonymous panel of selectors who produce detailed reports on the shortlisted books.

The prize winner will receive their Award and deliver their prize lecture at the LSE at a time and location to be confirmed later. The lecture will be open to the public.

About the book

The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience is praised by the selectors of the Lakatos Award as “strikingly ambitious and original, offering a coherent picture of the nature of science and its relation to the world, metaphysics and epistemology, all developed in the context of a sophisticated and highly informed account of the history and current practice of neuroscience”, and as a work which “both articulates a novel, very attractive general philosophy of science – haptic realism – and presents detailed, informative accounts of case studies. It thus excels both at the general and at the particular level”. The book is commended as “an outstanding example of the kind of work being done at the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy of science, combining detailed attention to the science and its history with interesting and important implications for philosophy more widely”, and one selector states that “while it is principally a work in the philosophy and history of neuroscience (broadly speaking), its principal arguments and proposals certainly have implications for other fields, including: general philosophy of science (especially realism/neo-Kantianism), philosophy of mind, and philosophy of biology (of complex living systems such as human beings)”.

About Mazviita Chirimuuta 

Mazviita Chirimuuta is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Her current research interests include philosophy of perception, philosophy of neuroscience, and history of the mind/brain sciences. She received her PhD in Vision Science from the University of Cambridge in 2004. Following that she held post-docs in perceptual psychology, and in philosophy at Monash University and at Washington University in St. Louis. Between 2011-2020 she was Assistant then Associate Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

About the Lakatos Award

The Lakatos Award is given annually for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, widely interpreted, in the form of a book published in English during the current year or the previous five years. More about the award.