The Lakatos Award is given annually for an outstanding contribution to the
philosophy of science, widely interpreted.[1] The contribution must be in the form of a
monograph, co-authored or single-authored, and published in English during the previous six years. The award is in memory of the influential Hungarian philosopher of science and mathematics
Imre Lakatos, whose tenure as Professor of Logic at the
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) was cut short by his early and unexpected death. While administered by an international management committee organised from the LSE, it is independent of the LSE Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method, with many of the committee's members being academics from other institutions. The value of the award, which has been endowed by the
Latsis Foundation, is £10,000, and to take it up a successful candidate must visit the LSE and deliver a public lecture.
Selection
The award is administered by the following committee:
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
2001 –
Judea Pearl for Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference (2000) on causal models and causal reasoning
2004 –
Kim Sterelny for Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition (2003)
ISBN978-0-631-18886-5 on the idea that thought is a response to threat[3]
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).
2012 –
Wolfgang Spohn for The Laws of Belief: Ranking Theory and its Philosophical Implications (2012)
2013 –
Laura Ruetsche for Interpreting Quantum Theories (2011) and David Wallace for The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory According to the Everett Interpretation (2012)
2014 –
Gordon Belot for Geometric Possibility (2011) and
David Malament for Topics in the Foundations of General Relativity and Newtonian Gravitation Theory (2012)