The North American Kant Society was founded at the Sixth International Kant Congress, held at Pennsylvania State University in 1985. Lewis White Beck did not attend the congress, but his presence was felt throughout. In the years that followed, he was always available with further encouragement and advice, and the Society lost a friend when he died in the summer of 1997.
This volume is a collection of Beck's most important essays on Kant's life and work. Beck represented Kant's legacy as a living and defensible philosophy when it was generally considered to be of antiquarian interest, and his work is responsible in no small measure for the Kant renaissance of the past 30 years. His essays on Kant reflect and advance twentieth-century philosophical concerns, and he stands as a model for generations of academic historians of philosophy by resisting the false dichotomy between philosophy and the history of philosophy prevalent among Anglo-American and Continental philosophers alike. From questions about the nature of analyticity to the validity of Wittgenstein's "private language argument" to the latest developments in the history of science, Beck's Kant interpretation never failed to connect to the present.
Lewis White Beck was professor of philosophy at the University of Rochester and one of the foremost scholars on the life and writings of Immanuel Kant.
