"Not merely a uniquely insightful account of the life and work of one of this century's most original philosophers, this book provides a glimpse of a vanished intellectual world, that of Middle Europe before the catastrophes. Finding Georg Lukacs and Hegel in Lakatos does more than elucidate Lakatos's thought; it provides us with an entry to a whole different intellectual style. As interpreted by Kadvany, Lakatos functions as a sort of Rosetta Stone to that brilliant but now quite foreign intellectual culture. A brilliant tour de force."--Jerome Ravetz, author of "Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems"

Analytic Contents
Preface
I. A Mathematical Bildungsroman
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1. The Mathematical Present as History
2. The Method of Proofs and Refutations
3. Mathematical Skepticism
4. Between Formal and Informal
5. Reason Inverted
II. A Changing Logic of Scientific Discovery
6. Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, Lakatos
7. An Historiographical Toolkit
8. Contradiction and Hindsight
9. Reason in History
10. A Changing Logic
11. Classical Political Economy as a Research Programme
III. Magyarország / Hungary
12. Hungary 1956 and the Inverted World
Notes
Bibliography

John Kadvany is a Principal at the mangement consulting firm Policy and Decision Science. He has published essays on Lakatos, the philosophy of mathematics, risk, and environmental policy.