Lewis White Beck 1913 – 1997
Lewis White Beck was an American philosopher and the most influential English-language Kant scholar of his generation. After studies at Emory and Duke and a long teaching career at the University of Rochester, where he was Burbank Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, he produced the standard English-language commentary on Kant's second Critique in his A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and the anthology Kant: Selections, which made the central texts of the critical philosophy accessible to generations of students. His Early German Philosophy traced the long German philosophical tradition from Eckhart through Kant.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
-
Attributed to Lewis White Beck:
“Kant's moral philosophy is the most uncompromising defense of human dignity in philosophy.”
-
Attributed to Lewis White Beck:
“The categorical imperative is the form of every moral act.”
-
Attributed to Lewis White Beck:
“What Kant calls reverence is the proper feeling of a rational being for the moral law.”
-
Attributed to Lewis White Beck:
“The dignity of the person is what no exchange can replace.”
-
Attributed to Lewis White Beck:
“Kant's critique of pure reason is the critique of metaphysics, not its dismissal.”