The year 1996 was regarded by a considerable part of contemporary literature on global political economy as a definite turning point in modern history. The majority of experts tended to see the starting point of take‐off that year, but others—not a negligible minority—saw omens of disastrous recession and lasting depression. It appears the time has not yet come. The question is now that of the incalculable resultant of runaway (deregulated) forces of the international financial “whirlpool”, of a random process of (...) global, regional and local accumulation of capital. The year 1997 will set in with a foreseeable and calculable agrarian and related cycle and it may find an outlet for accumulated tensions of capital accumulation at the high tide of unemployment (demographic or migratory) wave with unforeseeable and incalculable effects and side‐effects. This will be just the beginning of the end and a Black Weekday still lies ahead of us. There can be no doubt that we live in a transition period but we do not know where this transition leads to. Loose talk about “post‐industrial society”, “post‐modern age” and “postsomething anything” has limited interpretative power. Very few students of social sciences venture to see and verify secular trends in world history. (shrink)

Imre Lakatos' philosophical and scientific papers are published here in two volumes. Volume I brings together his very influential but scattered papers on the philosophy of the physical sciences, and includes one important unpublished essay on the effect of Newton's scientific achievement. Volume II presents his work on the philosophy of mathematics (much of it unpublished), together with some critical essays on contemporary philosophers of science and some famous polemical writings on political and educational issues. Imre Lakatos had (...) an influence out of all proportion to the length of his philosophical career. This collection exhibits and confirms the originality, range and the essential unity of his work. It demonstrates too the force and spirit he brought to every issue with which he engaged, from his most abstract mathematical work to his passionate 'Letter to the director of the LSE'. Lakatos' ideas are now the focus of widespread and increasing interest, and these volumes should make possible for the first time their study as a whole and their proper assessment. (shrink)

v. 1. The methodology of scientific research programmes.--v. 2. Mathematics, science, and epistemology.

Imre Lakatos' philosophical and scientific papers are published here in two volumes. Volume I brings together his very influential but scattered papers on the philosophy of the physical sciences, and includes one important unpublished essay on the effect of Newton's scientific achievement. Volume 2 presents his work on the philosophy of mathematics (much of it unpublished), together with some critical essays on contemporary philosophers of science and some famous polemical writings on political and educational issues.

Proofs and Refutations is essential reading for all those interested in the methodology, the philosophy and the history of mathematics. Much of the book takes the form of a discussion between a teacher and his students. They propose various solutions to some mathematical problems and investigate the strengths and weaknesses of these solutions. Their discussion raises some philosophical problems and some problems about the nature of mathematical discovery or creativity. Imre Lakatos is concerned throughout to combat the classical picture (...) of mathematical development as a steady accumulation of established truths. He shows that mathematics grows instead through a richer, more dramatic process of the successive improvement of creative hypotheses by attempts to 'prove' them and by criticism of these attempts: the logic of proofs and refutations. (shrink)

Imre Lakatos; II—Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 69, Issue 1, 1 June 1969, Page.

Institutions are a kind of social infrastructure that facilitates – or hinders – human co-ordination and allocation of resources. Thus they function as a rationality context, which simultaneously emerges from and governs human interactions. Business institutions, as they are related to human expectations, should promote the values of their stakeholders and, consequently, they are subjects of social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting procedures. Ethical institutions make the good of their stakeholder groups part of the institution’s own good. They have (...) a clear vision and picture of integrity throughout the institution which is owned and embodied by top management, over time. Such a practice presumes that business institutions, e.g. corporations, are social cultures with character, which can exercise good or bad influence, depending on goals, policies structures, strategies that formalize relations among the individuals who build up corporations. For developing an ethical culture, corporations need a large scale of instruments as codes of ethics and other kinds of support structures throughout the organization to insure their adequate communication, oversight, enforcement, adjudication, and review. Between all these instruments, a special role could be played by the ethics officer and the ethics committee, ethics trainings, ethics audits but also by the implementation of responsibility and participatory decision making at lower levels in the organisation. (shrink)

This text, excerpted from a “diary novel” by Imre Kertész, appeared in both Hungarian and German in 2014. Now suffering with an advanced stage of Parkinson's disease, the author considers it the last work that he will be able to complete.

It is generally believed, that when the surface/volume ratio is high, fractal structure is expected to exist. The branched fractal structure of the lung has been cited as a classical example of this statement. In this short paper I would like to demonstrate that an alternative lung structure (namely sponge-like fractal) is at least as good as, or even better than the branched one, concerning this ratio, therefore, the cause of the lung''s fractality lies elsewhere.

The work that helped to determine Paul Feyerabend's fame and notoriety, Against Method,stemmed from Imre Lakatos's challenge: "In 1970 Imre cornered me at a party. 'Paul,' he said, 'you have such strange ideas.

“Deus fons veritatis”: the Subject and its Freedom. The Ontic Foundation of Mathematical Truth is the title of Gaspare Polizzi’s long biographical-theoretical interview with Imre Toth. The interview is divided into eight parts. The first part describes the historical and cultural context in which Toth was formed. A Jew by birth, during the Second World War Toth became a communist and a partisan, enduring prison, torture, and internment in a concentration camp from 1940 until 6 June 1944. In the (...) second part Toth presents his mathematical training as a “vocation” that led him to rethink the whole tradition of mathematical thought critically, on the basis of non-Euclidean geometry. In the third part Toth describes his research in the history of mathematics, which begin with his studies on Aristotle and mathematical thought and on Plato and the negative ontology of the irrational recognizable in the theory of the infinite dyad and of the One. In the fourth part Toth criticizes the positions of Frege, who came to deny non-Euclidean geometry, viewing it as an expression of irrationality and mysticism. In the fifth part Toth maintains that mathesis and poiesis have similar ontological structures, and he speaks of his collages métaphysiques. In the sixth part Toth recalls how the birth of the idea of freedom made possible the highest political, social and artistic achievements, as well as the entire movement of human emancipation. And this was thanks to philosophy, which is not a science but a knowledge of the subject on the subject’s part. In the seventh and eighth parts Toth speaks of the value and the role of mathematics in the affirmation of the phenomenology of freedom, and remarks on his relations with French and Italian cultures. (shrink)

La question au nombre irrationnel et de l'irrationnel mathématique en général, tient une part discrète dans l'oeuvre de Platon, mais elle est comme cette "pierre délaissée par les architectes" et qui est pourtant "la pierre angulaire". Elle concentre toutes les questions de l'être et du non-être, du possible et de l'impossible, du fini et de l'infini et ouvre la voie à la liberté pleine et entière de l'homme en quête de vérité. En elle, convergent pensée mathématique et spéculation philosophique, en (...) une harmonie riche de conséquences inestimables. C'est cette harmonie que révèle Imre Toth dans un essai brillant et rigoureux, le dernier qu'il ait écrit avant sa brusque disparition en mai 2010. "Les Editions de l'éclat viennent de contribuer à réparer ce qui apparaît comme une lacune de l'édition française en publiant deux textes récents d'Imre Toth" - Françoise Balibar (Critique). "Le livre de Toth est extrêmement séduisant, croisant la polémique politique la plus vive avec l'initiation limpide aux problèmes fondamentaux de la philosophie des mathématiques" - Jean-Paul Thomas (Le Monde). "Philosophes comme historiens des sciences pourront tirer profit de ce regard enflammé sur le processus mathématique, qui place la liberté au coeur de la création, mais va au-delà en cherchant à comprendre son fonctionnement, précisément en mathématique" - Jean-Michel Kantor (La Quinzaine littéraire). (shrink)

It seems that German culture is especially favorable to philosophical reflection on technology. In fact, it seems that in Germany have been published more books on this topic as elsewhere in Europe altogether. Philosophy of technology in Germany concentrates very strongly on ethics. Efforts have been made in order to develop a set of basic values for engineers, to give a reasonable background to them, to make ethics useful for technology assessment, etc. The detailed structure of responsibility, the ethical evaluation (...) of long term effects and an advisory role for ethicians may be seen as central points in this kind of debates. (shrink)

La géométrie non euclidienne fut non seulement un bouleversement sans précédent dans l'histoire des mathématiques, mais également une bouffée d'air pur pour les partisans d'une "vérité sans les dogmes". Par ce "non" augmentatif, elle affirmait l'existence d'un en-dehors de l'Être, vingt-quatre siècles après le Parménide de Platon, et plaçait, more geometrico, la philosophie dans l'espace de la spiritualité occidentale, ouvrant la voie à la liberté dans le domaine des sciences rigoureuses. C'est aux implications philosophiques de cette révolution mathématique qu'est consacré (...) l'essai d'Imre Toth, qui étudie également certains aspects de la pensée de Gottlob Frege, farouche adversaire de la géométrie non euclidienne, pour en démontrer les impasses et les fourvoiements. (shrink)

In his collection of anecdotes, Lives, Opinions, and Remarkable Sayings of the Most Famous Ancient Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius devotes a chapter to the life of Zeno of Elea. Zeno's reputation is based on his celebrated paradoxes, amply discussed by Aristotle: a moving body will never reach its (pre-defined) telos, since it first has to cover half (or more than half) the remaining distance; the faster will never catch up with the slower, since it first has to get to the point (...) from which the slower has just left. Zeno's style is laconic, like that of an Aesop fable. Maxima e minimis: there is no superfluous word. Everything needed to arrive at the conclusion is explicitly stated. (shrink)