Lewis White Beck

Lewis White Beck
Born	(1913-09-26)26 September 1913
Died	7 June 1997(1997-06-07) (aged 83) Rochester, New York
Awards	Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Era	Western philosophy
Region	German philosophy
Main interests	Immanuel Kant, Moral philosophy

Lewis White Beck (September 26, 1913 – June 7, 1997) was an American philosopher and scholar of German philosophy. Beck was Burbank Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at the University of Rochester and served as the Philosophy Department chair there from 1949 to 1966. He translated several of Immanuel Kant's works, such as the Critique of Practical Reason, and was the author of Studies in the Philosophy of Kant (1965).

Biography

Born in Griffin, Georgia, Beck received his bachelor's degree from Emory University in 1934, his master's degree from Duke University in 1935, and his doctoral degree from Duke University in 1937.

Before moving to Rochester, he was an international student at the University of Berlin (1937–38; an interview about his experiences there appeared in The Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 18, 1938), an instructor at Emory University (1938–41), assistant professor at the University of Delaware (1941–46), and associate professor at Lehigh University (1946–48), eventually becoming professor (1948–49). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.

He retired in 1979 and died at age 83 in Rochester, New York.

Selected publications

External videos
You may read Lewis White Beck's: Studies in the Philosophy of Kant (1965) Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (1969) and additional publications about Kant Here on Archive.org

Books

• Philosophic Inquiry: An Introduction to Philosophy (1952)
• A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1961)
• Six Secular Philosophers (1966)
• Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (1969)
• The Actor and the Spectator (1975)
• Essays on Kant and Hume (1978)
• Mr. Boswell dines with Professor Kant (1979)

Translations

• Kant, Immanuel (1950). Lewis White Beck (ed.). Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science. New York: Bobbss Merrill Educational Publishing – via Internet Archive.
• Kant, Immanuel (1956). Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Lewis White Beck. New York: The Liberal Arts Press – via Internet Archive.
• Kant, Immanuel (1997). The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment. Translated by Lewis White Beck (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Inc. – via Internet Archive.

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

External links

• "Philosopher, Scholar Lewis White Beck Dies" - University of Rochester press release.
• Lewis White Beck papers, A.B39, Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester
• The contingent cathedral: notes on Lewis White Beck’s Early German Philosophy - Notes on, quotations from and summary of Beck's Early German Philosophy
• "Lewis White Beck". JSTOR.
• Works by or about Lewis White Beck at Internet Archive