This paper attempts to present a general picture of the most important philosophical elements found in the Hungarian writings of Imre Lakatos, later the famous philosopher of science in England, with a focus on his views on science and its social context. In the first section, Lakatos' life in Hungary is summarized, with a special emphasis on those few years when most of the Hungarian works were written. The second section offers a list of his Hungarian publications, each item accompanied (...) by a brief description. Then we examine the lost doctoral dissertation and its possible contents as reconstructed from the reports of the readers and the published texts. Finally we identify the main philosophical sources the young Lakatos could have used, and give a summary of his basic views on science. (shrink)

Lakatos is considered to be a Popperian who adapted his Hegelian-Marxist training to critical philosophy. I claim this is too narrow and misses Lakatos' goal of understanding scientific inquiry as heuristic inquiry—something he did not find in Popper, but found in Polanyi. Archival material shows that his ‘new method' struggled to overcome what he saw as the Popperian handicap, by using Polanyi.