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...

Understanding Purpose is an exploration of the central concept of natural purpose (Naturzweck) in Kant's philosophy of biology. Kant's work in this area is marked by a strong teleological concern: living organisms, in his view, are qualitatively different from mechanistic devices, and as a result they cannot be understood by means of the same principles. At the same time, Kant's own use of the concept of purpose does not presuppose any theological commitments, and is merely -regulative-; that is, it is employed as a heuristic device. The contributors to this volume also investigate the...

The concept of community plays a central role in Kant's theoretical philosophy, his practical philosophy, his aesthetics, and his religious thought. Kant uses community in many philosophical contexts: the category of community introduced in his table of categories in the Critique of Pure Reason; the community of substances in the third analogy; the realm of ends as an ethical community; the state and the public sphere as political communities; the sensus communis of the Critique of Judgment; and the idea of the church as a religious community in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason....