The question is how he came to jettison so much of his intellectual past, and to believe himself a friend of reason, while making his living out of a project fundamentally irrational. Lakatos himself never quite lost Hegel's faith that there was some rational direction to history. But his work served to reinforce a much more modern version of historicism. It is in mathematics that is it most obvious that the fundamental reason why the theorems are as they are is that they agree with the absolute truth. God forbade it, indeed, but Faustus hath done it.
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Go back to the text. From The New Criterion Vol.