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.

Lewis White Beck was born at Griffin, Georgia, in September 1913. He took his bachelor's at Emory in 1934 and his doctorate at Duke in 1937 with a dissertation on Kant. After lectureships at Lehigh and a wartime period of work in operations research he joined the University of Rochester in 1949, where he was Burbank Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy until his retirement in 1979.

His books include the Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1960), still the standard English commentary on the second Critique; Studies in the Philosophy of Kant (1965); Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors (1969); the essays of The Actor and the Spectator (1975); and Essays on Kant and Hume (1978). He also produced widely used translations of the second Critique and the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.

Beck combined careful textual scholarship with a clear philosophical voice and was the leading American Kantian of the mid-twentieth century, a co-founder of the North American Kant Society and long-time editor of Kant-Studien and the Translation Library. His Early German Philosophy remains the standard English study of the philosophical background to the first Critique. He died at Rochester in May 1997.