Beck, Jacob Sigismund (1761–1840)

Beck played a brief but important role in the development of post-Kantian philosophy. A former student of Kant, he published at his teacher’s instigation three volumes of ‘Explanatory Abstracts’ of Kant’s major writings. In the third volume Beck presented what he regarded as the ‘Only Possible Standpoint’ from which Critical Philosophy had to be judged if misunderstandings of Kant’s work were to be avoided. His ‘Doctrine of the Standpoint’ involved a ‘reversal’ of the method of the Critique of Pure Reason and the elimination of the ‘thing-in-itself’ from Kant’s theoretical philosophy.