Lakatos Award

 ( Philosophy Awards ) 

• Professor Roman Frigg (Convenor, LSE)
• Professor Richard Bradley (LSE)
• Professor Hasok Chang (University of Cambridge)
• Professor Nancy Cartwright (University of Durham)
• Professor Kostas Gavroglu (University of Athens)
• Professor Helen Longino (Stanford University)
• Professor Samir Okasha (University of Bristol)
• Professor Sabina Leonelli (University of Exeter)

The Committee makes the Award on the advice of an independent and anonymous panel of selectors.

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

2001 – Judea Pearl for Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference (2000) on causal models and causal reasoning

2002 – Penelope Maddy for Naturalism in Mathematics (1997) on the issue of how the of set theory are justified

2003 – Patrick Suppes for Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures (2002) on a wide range of scientific theories in terms of set theory

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

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

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)

2015 – Thomas Pradeu for The Limits of the Self: Immunology and Biological Identity (2012)

2016 – Brian Epstein for The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences (2015)

2017 – Craig Callender for What Makes Time Special?

2018 – Sabina Leonelli for Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study (2016)

2019 – Henk W. de Regt for Understanding Scientific Understanding (2017)

2020 – Nicholas Shea for Representation in Cognitive Science (2018)

2021 – Anya Plutynski for Explaining Cancer: Finding Order in Disorder (2018)

2022 – Catarina Dutilh Novaes for The Dialogical Roots of Deduction: Historical, Cognitive, and Philosophical Perspectives on Reasoning (2020)

2023 – Michela Massimi for Perspectival Realism (2022).

2024 – Carl Hoefer for Chance in the World: A Humean Guide to Objective Chance (2019).

2025 – Mazviita Chirimuuta for The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (2024).

• The Lakatos Award website at the LSE