The late Lewis White Beck, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester for many years, 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 philosoophical 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 tast of providing a unitary wolrdview 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 creativy 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.