Lewis White Beck
Lewis White Beck
Lewis White Beck was an American philosopher and scholar of German philosophy specializing in German idealism at the University of Rochester. As Chairman of the Department of Philosophy, he achieved international recognition for encouraging collaborative research by scholars within the United States and Germany into the philosophy of Immanuel Kant during the post World War II era. Beck also transl
"For it is only in the Critique that all the various strands of Kants 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."
"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."
"Myth, religion and now science-fiction with their tales of benevolent and malevolent extraterrestrial beings are commentaries on the human condition. I believe even responsible scientific speculation and expensive technology of space exploration in search for other life are the peculiarly modern equivalent of angeology and Utopia or of demonology and apocalypse."
"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."
"If you believe that you are not a machine, but that I am (then) I do not know why you are reading this book"."
"[T]he only species on earth which prides itself on its intelligence is the only one with the intelligence necessary, and possibly sufficient, to render itself extinct tomorrow."
