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 was the youngest of four children in a family raised by Erasmus W. Beck and Ann H. Beck. His siblings included: Evelyn H. Beck , Edwin H. Beck and Sarah A Beck. His father was employed as both an engineer and a sales representative.

Beck received his bachelor's degree Phi Beta Kappa from Emory University in 1934, his master's degree from Duke University in 1935, and his doctoral degree from Duke University in 1937. His dissertation was entitled: "Synopsis: A Study in the Theory of Knowledge.

Academic career

Before moving to Rochester, Beck was an international student and a Fellow 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).

Beck joined the faculty at the University or Rochester in 1949 and served as Chairman of its Department of Philosophy from 1949-1966. He also served as Associate Dean of the Graduate School (1952-1956) as well as the Dean of the Graduate School (1956-1957) where he helped to raise international recognition for the PhD. program in Philosophy. In !962 he was appointed as the Burbank Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy and subsequently Professor Emeritus in 1979. In 1962 he became the first recipient of the University's Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He was subsequently elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.

During the course of his long academic career, Beck also held appointments as a visiting lecturer at several leading academic research centers including: Columbia University (1950), George Washington University, the University of Minnesota (1953), the University of California at Berkeley (1973), Yale University (1974) and the Rochester Institute of Technology (1982-1983). In addition, he received honorary degrees from Hamilton College, Emory University and the University of Tubingen.

Academic works

Beck is most noted for his research into the collective writings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Included among his publications is a translation of Kant's extensive "Critique of Pure Reason" in 1949. He also achieved widespread national and international recognition within academic circles for his scholarship, commentary and encyclopedic knowledge of Kant's philosophical works.

Over the years, Beck was praised by his students for his charm and wit. Even after his formal retirement in 1979 he continued to meet with informal gatherings of aspiring young scholars in an effort to share his unique insights into Kant's works until 1996. He was often observed to joke that his prize for an award in teaching excellence was rejected as "nontaxable" by the Internal Revenue Service because it was more appropriately categorized as "unearned".

Death

Beck 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