Lewis White Beck Quotes on Mind
Lewis White Beck was an American philosopher and the most influential English-language Kant scholar of his generation. This page collects quotes attributed to Lewis White Beck on the topic of mind, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Lewis White Beck:
“What Kant calls reverence is the proper feeling of a rational being for the moral law.”
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“In the logic of science there is a principle as important as that of parsimony: it is that of sufficient reason. The former directs us to look for simplest causes, the later cautions us not to simplify so far that the explanation is inadequate to the facts to be explained....Parsimony is not itself a simple criterion of a good methodology; we cannot simply count the factors of explanation and say that the theory containing the smallest number is the best. The ideal of parsimony cannot be expressed without the proviso that the conditions for which it is a norm shall themselves be adequate.”
Lewis White Beck , The "Natural Science Ideal" in the Social Sciences (1949) , pp. 393-394 -
“For it is only in the Critique that all the various strands of Kant's thought are woven together into the pattern of his practical philosophy. This pattern, in turn, can be understood only in the entire fabric of the critical philosophy, and that rich design can be clear only to those who have understood each of its three principal parts, which are the three Critiques and not shorter and more popular works like the Prolegomena and the Foundations .”
Lewis White Beck , A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1961) , p. VI Foreword -
“Lewis White Beck , A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1961) , p. VI Foreword”
For it is only in the Critique that all the various strands of Kant's thought are woven together into the pattern of his practical philosophy. This pattern, in turn, can be understood only in the entire fabric of the critical philosophy, and that rich design can be clear only to those who have understood each of its three principal parts, which are the three Critiques and not shorter and more popu -
“But somewhat like people who object to spending money needed in the ghettoes on exploring the moon, I think the best hope for our survival is to be based on understanding human predicaments here on earth, not expecting a saving message from super-human beings in the sky...Thinking about and even hoping to find extraterrestrial civilizations, however, sharpen our search for and appreciation of the peculiar virtues and vices of the only form of life we know.”
Lewis White Beck , "Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life" in Extraterrestrials Science and Alien Intelligence ( Regis Jr., Edward. Ed., 1985) , Part V, p. 14