Table of Contents

Analytic Contents
Preface
I. A Mathematical Bildungsroman

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

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"I have rarely encountered a book with as many fresh and arresting ideas from so many seemingly disparate intellectual and historical contexts. With wit, verve, and concision, Kadvany combines an impressive command of the traditions of philosophy, science, mathematics, and economic theory with an impassioned and insightful mastery of the history of Hungary during the Communist era."- Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley "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