Philosophy, Science, and (Anti-)Communism: The Two Lives of Imre Lakatos*

Thirty years after the untimely death of Imre Lakatos, the enduring influence of several Lakatosian issues and ideas asks for a systematic appraisal of his work. A significant step in this direction has been made in two workshops, or-ganized by the Institute Vienna Circle and the Institute for History and Philos-ophy of Science of Eötvös University, which were held in Vienna and Bu-dapest in autumn 1997. The workshops resulted in the present substantial (382 pages) volume, which includes seventeen papers dealing with Lakatos ’ philos-ophy and biography and several documents and photographs about his work and life. The papers have been divided into three sections, concerning Lakatos’ philosophy of science (Section I) and mathematics (Section II), and his intel-lectual and political biography (Section III). The contributions collected in Section I deal especially with Lakatos’ methodology of scientific research programmes – henceforth, MSRP. The con-ceptual skeleton of MSRP can be described as follows. A scientific research programme takes the form of a series of successively developed theories shar-ing a hard core and a positive heuristic. The hard core consists of hypotheses that are irrefutable within the programme, while the residual hypotheses, i.e