MIGUEL ÂNGELO FLACH

In Chapter 1 of the Doctoral Thesis, I revisit Imre Lakatos's debates with his most well-known critical interlocutors at the time, such as Karl R. Popper, Thomas S. Kuhn, Paul K. Feyerabend, Noretta Koertge, Alan Musgrave, and others, in order to reconstruct the terms in which Lakatos then endeavored to support his methodology. In chapter 2, I intend to present and characterize the different readers and their readings of Lakatos, i. e., the controversy between the 'dialectical' and 'analytical' interpreters over conceptions that would (or would not) express Hegel's influence upon Lakatos, but specifically in the context of his philosophy of science. In chapter 3, I propose that, in order to connect Lakatos's proposition of a normative philosophy of science with the pragmatic (and historical) reality of science, a Lakatosian methodology will be more robust if it explicitly adopts a philosophical "naturalism". Finally, in chapter 4, I defend a Lakatosian theory of "progress" by arguing that the Lakatosian quasi-empirical approach is articulated, metamethodologically, under an inductive-critically informed normativity.