Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos (1922-74), the internationally renowned philosopher of mathematics and science, lectured at the LSE in its Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method from 1960 until his untimely death in 1974 at the age of 51. He became its Professor of Logic in 1969. He is the author of the classic work in the philosophy of mathematics Proofs and Refutations and proposed a renowned account of scientific method called The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.
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.
The Lakatos Award is in memory of Imre Lakatos and has been endowed by the Latsis Foundation. It is administered by an international Management Committee organised by LSE, but entirely independent of LSE’s Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method. The Committee decides the outcome of the competition on the advice of an international, independent and anonymous panel of selectors who produce detailed reports on the shortlisted books
The committee currently comprises the following.
- Richard Bradley (LSE)
- Jim Brown (Toronto)
- Nancy Cartwright (Durham)
- Hasok Chang (Cambridge)
- Roman Frigg (Convenor, LSE)
- Sabina Leonelli (Exeter)
- Helen Longino (Stanford)
The Committee accepts and reviews nominations, compiles a shortlist, and grants the Award based on the recommendations of an independent, anonymous panel of selectors who read and evaluate all shortlisted books.
The Award is valued at £10,000. To accept it, the recipient must visit the LSE and deliver a public lecture. The Award may be shared if two candidates are deemed to be of equal merit. The Committee also reserves the right to make no award if none of the shortlisted works is judged to meet the required standard of impact and significance.
Lakatos Award Lectures
Each Lakatos award winner delivers a Lakatos Award Lecture to present their work and receive their award. You can find a list of all Lakatos Award winners as well as information on their award-winning books and the recording of their lecture on our dedicated Lakatos Award Lecture page.
Lakatos Award 2026 – Call for nominations
The London School of Economics and Political Science invites nominations for the 2026 Lakatos Award. For the 2026 Award, books published in English with an imprint from 2020 to 2025, inclusive, are eligible.
Nominations must be received by Monday 15 September 2025.
The award is given for a monograph in the philosophy of science broadly construed, either single authored or co-authored, published in English. Anthologies and edited collections are not eligible for nomination. Any person recognised standing within the philosophy of science or an allied field may nominate a book. Nominations must include a statement, of between one and three paragraphs, explaining the nominator’s reasons for regarding the book prize-worthy. Self-nominations are not allowed. The nominator should write to the Lakatos Award Administrator with “Lakatos Award nomination” in the subject header. These letters will be passed on to the selectors if the book is shortlisted.
Please send nominations, or any queries, to the Lakatos Award Administrator Tom Hinrichsen (t.a.hinrichsen@lse.ac.uk).
Lakatos’ 100th Birthday
On 2-4 November 2022, the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method hosted a conference to celebrate the life and work of Imre Lakatos on the centenary of his birth.
Here are some personal words by John Worrall, former Professor of Philosophy at LSE, on Lakatos’ 100th birthday:
‘I first met Imre Lakatos in early October 1966: the start of my second year as an LSE undergraduate. I had – purely out of interest – attended Karl Popper’s lectures on “Problems of Philosophy” in my first year at LSE, was blown away by them and at the end of the year decided to switch my BSc (Econ) “Special Subject” from “Statistics” to “Philosophy, Logic & Scientific Method”. I had been assigned the fearsome Dr Lakatos as my tutor for my second and third years of study.
A rather shy 19-year old working class lad from Lancashire, I approached the door of Lakatos’s office in the (now demolished) East Building with trepidation – justified trepidation as it turned out: I was brusquely told that, whatever the Regulations might say about the number of times you should see your tutor, he would absolutely refuse to see me again unless and until I had carefully read, and worked through the all the exercises in, Stoll’s Set Theory and Logic, Courant and Robbins’ What is Mathematics? and a physics text by Holton and Roller (He also threw in Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers and Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations for “light relief”).
I think he didn’t expect to see me again – but some time shortly before the end of the first term I turned up at his office carrying my attempts at all the exercises. After a (pretty cursory) glance at my answers – I could have got away with being a lot less conscientious (!), he pronounced me a “hopeful monster” (look it up, I had to) and my reward was an offprint of the 4 articles making up his “Proofs and Refutations” and an invitation (more like an instruction, really) to attend the Popper Seminar (a 2nd year undergrad at a Staff/Student seminar – heady stuff!)
After that, I saw him often – once I had graduated, I became his Research Assistant, PhD student and, I guess, protegė. Without him, I would never have started an academic career. I am very excited at the prospect of celebrating the continuing impact of his contributions to philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics at the upcoming Centenary Conference.’
Read more about Imre Lakatos on the LSE blog: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2023/01/27/imre-lakatos-and-lse/
