Kant's Legacy

The late Lewis White Beck, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester, was one of the world's leading Kant scholars. Beck considered the most significant element of Kant's rich, complex, and controversial legacy to be the ultimate philosophical question: What is Man? Kant's answer that humans are creators is ambiguous. On the one hand, it dignifies humans by elevating them above blind mechanical forces of nature. But it also imposes difficult burdens, including the task of...
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The late Lewis White Beck, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester, was one of the world's leading Kant scholars. Beck considered the most significant element of Kant's rich, complex, and controversial legacy to be the ultimate philosophical question: What is Man? Kant's answer that humans are creators is ambiguous. On the one hand, it dignifies humans by elevating them above blind mechanical forces of nature. But it also imposes difficult burdens, including the task of providing a unitary worldview and an immanently grounded system of values and norms. The contributors to this volume, under Beck's influence, concur that this theme is of central importance for the proper understanding and evaluation of Kant's legacy. The papers address issues concerning creativity in all aspects of human experience from knowledge of the external world to self-knowledge, from moral to religious dilemmas, from judgments of taste to the art of living with a constant awareness of the limitations as well as the possibilities of such creativity.