Lakatos Award

The Lakatos Award is given annually for a contribution to the philosophy of science which is widely interpreted as outstanding. The contribution must be in the form of a book published in English during the previous six years.

The Award is in memory of Imre Lakatos and has been endowed by the Latsis Foundation. It is administered by the following committee:

• The Director of the London School of Economics (Chairman)
• Professor John Worrall (Convenor)
• Professor Hans Albert
• Professor Nancy Cartwright
• Professor Adolf Grünbaum
• Professor Philip Kitcher
• Professor Alan Musgrave
• Professor Michael Redhead

The Committee makes the Award on the advice of an independent and anonymous panel of selectors. The value of the Award is £10,000.

To take up an Award a successful candidate must visit the LSE and deliver a public lecture.

Winners

The Award has so far been won by:

1986 - Bas Van Fraassen

for The Scientific Image (1980)

and Hartry Field

for Science Without Numbers (1980)

1987 - Michael Friedman

for Foundations of Space-Time Theories

and Philip Kitcher

for Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature

1988 - Michael Redhead

for Incompleteness, Nonlocality and Realism

1989 - John Earman

for A Primer on Determinism

1991 - Elliott Sober

for Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Interference (1988)

1993 - Peter Achinstein

for Particles and Waves: Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Science (1991)

and Alexander Rosenberg

for Economics--Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? (1992)

1994 - Michael Dummett

for Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (1991)

1995 - Lawrence Sklar

for Physics and Chance: Philosophical Issues in the Foundations of Statistical Mechanics (1993)

1996 - Abner Shimony

for The Search for a Naturalistic World View (1993)

1998 - Jeffrey Bub

for Interpreting the Quantum World

and Deborah Mayo

for Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge

1999 - Brian Skyrms

for Evolution of the Social Contract (1996) on modelling 'fair', non self-interested human actions using (cultural) evolutionary dynamics ([1])

2001 - Judea Pearl

for Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference (2000) on causal models and causal reasoning ([2])

2002 - Penelope Maddy

for Naturalism in Mathematics (1997) on the issue of how the axioms of set theory are justified ([3])

2003 - Patrick Suppes

for Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures (2002) on axiomatising a wide range of scientific theories in terms of set theory ([4])

2004 - Kim Sterelny

for Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition (2003) on the idea that thought is a response to threat ([5])

2005 - James Woodward

for Making Things Happen (2003) on causality and explanation

2006 - Harvey Brown

for Physical Relativity: Space-time Structure from a Dynamical Perspective (2005)

and Hasok Chang

for Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (2004)

2008 - Richard Healey

for Gauging What’s Real: the conceptual foundations of contemporary gauge theories (2007)

2009 -Samir Okasha

for Evolution and the Levels of Selection (2006).

2010 -Peter Godfrey-Smith

for Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection

External links

• The Lakatos Award website at the LSE