The late Lewis White Beck, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester for many years, was one of the world's leading Kant scholars. Beck considered the most significant element of Kant's rich, complex, and controversial legacy to be the ultimate philosoophical question: 'What is Man?' Kant's answer - that humans are creators - is ambiguous. On the one hand, it dignifies humans by elevating them above blind mechanical forces of nature. But it also imposes difficult burdens, including the tast of providing a unitary wolrdview and an immanently grounded system of values and norms. The contributors to this volume, under Beck's influence, concur that this theme is of central importance for the proper understanding and evaluation of Kant's legacy. The papers address issues concerning creativy in all aspects of human experience - from knowledge of the external world to self-knowledge, from moral to religious dilemmas, from judgments of taste to the art of living - with a constant awareness of the limitations as well as the possibilities of such creativity. Predrag Cicovacki is Associate Professor of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross.
When this work was first published in 1960, it immediately filled a void in Kantian scholarship. It was the first study entirely devoted to Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and by far the most substantial commentary on it ever written. This landmark in Western philosophical literature remains an indispensable aid to a complete understanding of Kant's philosophy for students and scholars alike. This Critique is the only writing in which Kant weaves his thoughts on practical reason into a unified argument. Lewis White Beck offers a classic examination of this argument and expertly places it in the context of Kant's philosophy and of the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century.
A collection of Lewis White Beck's most important essays on Immanuel Kant's philosophy. The North American Kant Society was founded at the Sixth International Kant Congress, held at Pennsylvania State University in 1985. Lewis White Beck did not attend the congress, but his presence was felt throughout. In the yearsthat followed, he was always available with further encouragement and advice, and the Society lost a friend when he died in the summer of 1997. This volume is a collection of Beck's most important essays on Kant's life and work. Beck represented Kant's legacy as a living and defensible philosophy when it was generally considered to be of antiquarian interest, and his work is responsible in no small measure for the Kant renaissance of the past 30 years. His essays on Kant reflect and advance twentieth-century philosophical concerns, and he stands as a model for generations of academic historians of philosophy by resisting the false dichotomy between philosophy and the history of philosophy prevalent among Anglo-American and Continental philosophers alike. From questions about the nature of analyticity to the validity of Wittgenstein's "private language argument" to the latest developments in the historyof science, Beck's Kant interpretation never failed to connect to the present. Lewis White Beck was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester and one of the foremost scholars on the life and writings of Immanuel Kant.
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