Donald Gillies. Lakatos and the Historical Approach to Philosophy of Mathematics

At between 20,000 and 30,000 words, books in the Cambridge Elements series are an effort by Cambridge University Press to create a middle ground between the journal article and the full-length monograph. There are so far twenty Elements titles in philosophy of mathematics. This one, by Donald Gillies, is not principally a contribution to Lakatos scholarship, though it does gain some details from Gillies having studied for his doctorate under Lakatos. After a brief introduction, the second section neatly summarises Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations and presents it as the original and exemplary introduction of the historical method into philosophy of mathematics...