Mazviita Chirimuuta (Edinburgh) is the winner of the 2025 Lakatos Award.

Chirimuuta received the award for her book, The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (2024, MIT Press).

The Lakatos Award is given annually for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, widely interpreted, in the form of a book published in English during the current year or the previous five years. It includes a £10,000 prize and the honor of delivering a public lecture at the London School of Economics (LSE).

The award is sponsored by the Latsis Foundation and administered by a committee organized by the LSE.

According to a press release,

The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience is praised by the selectors of the Lakatos Award as “strikingly ambitious and original, offering a coherent picture of the nature of science and its relation to the world, metaphysics and epistemology, all developed in the context of a sophisticated and highly informed account of the history and current practice of neuroscience”, and as a work which “both articulates a novel, very attractive general philosophy of science—haptic realism—and presents detailed, informative accounts of case studies. It thus excels both at the general and at the particular level”. The book is commended as “an outstanding example of the kind of work being done at the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy of science, combining detailed attention to the science and its history with interesting and important implications for philosophy more widely”, and one selector states that “while it is principally a work in the philosophy and history of neuroscience (broadly speaking), its principal arguments and proposals certainly have implications for other fields, including: general philosophy of science (especially realism/neo-Kantianism), philosophy of mind, and philosophy of biology (of complex living systems such as human beings)”.

Last year, Chirimuuta won the Nayef Al-Rodhan International Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy for the book.