The London School of Economics and Political Science is pleased to announce the winner of the 2019 Lakatos Award.

The 2019 Lakatos Award goes to Henk W. de Regt for his book Understanding Scientific Understanding (Oxford University Press, 2017).

The Lakatos Award is given for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, broadly construed, in the form of a book published in English during the previous five years.

The Lakatos Award was made possible by a generous endowment from the Latsis Foundation, in memory of the former LSE professor Imre Lakatos. It is administered by an international Management Committee, which is organised from the LSE but entirely independent of LSE’s Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method. The Committee decides the outcome of the Award competition on the basis of advice from an anonymous panel of Selectors who produce detailed reports on the shortlisted books.

The Award lecture and ceremony will take place in the autumn, at a time and location to be confirmed later. The lecture will be open to the public.

Understanding Scientific Understanding is praised by the Selectors as “a remarkable book”. It is “a long anticipated book that does important work reframing our own philosophical aims and norms of intelligibility”. De Regt’s work is “is a magnificent example of how history and philosophy of science can be productively integrated”, making its point through historical case studies that are “scholarly and insightful”. The book is “a serious, carefully argued work, on a neglected but important topic in the philosophy of science”.