John W. N. Watkins

On 26 July 1999, eleven weeks after completing his book Human Freedom after Darwin, Watkins died of a heart attack while sailing his boat, Xantippe, on the Salcombe estuary, South Devon, England.

After his retirement in 1989, Watkins played a leading role in establishing the Lakatos Award in the Philosophy of Science as the pre-eminent scholarly distinction in the field, honouring his former colleague Imre Lakatos who had died, aged only 51, in 1974.

In 1965 Watkins published Hobbes's System of Ideas, in which he argued that Thomas Hobbes's political theory follows from his philosophical ideas.

At an international symposium on Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge held in London in 1965, Watkins replied to a paper in which Thomas S. Kuhn had compared his own theory of scientific revolutions with Popper's falsificationism. He saw a clash between

Watkins had attended Karl Popper's lectures at the LSE in logic and scientific method "and had fallen under his spell". 1958 he shifted from the Government Department to Popper's, being appointed Reader in Philosophy. Imre Lakatos joined them in 1960. Watkins and Lakatos edited the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, and Watkins was President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science from 1972 until 1975. When Popper retired in 1970, Watkins took over his chair.

In 1952, Watkins married Micky Roe (one son, three daughters).

In 1944 he was decorated with the DSC for torpedoing a German destroyer off the French coast, part of an action which defeated the only remaining surface force that might have interfered with the Normandy landings.

Reading Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) on his destroyer aroused his interest in attending the LSE where Hayek taught. A First in Political Science and a prize-winning essay won him a Henry Ford Fellowship to Yale, where he graduated MA in 1950. Then he returned to the LSE as assistant lecturer in political science.

In 1941, aged 17, Watkins passed out in the First Division from the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth and went straight into the wartime Navy. He served in destroyers, escorting Russian convoys and the battleship carrying Churchill back from Marrakech.

John William Nevill Watkins (31 July 1924 – 26 July 1999) was an English philosopher, a professor at the London School of Economics from 1966 until his retirement in 1989 and a prominent proponent of critical rationalism.