Even after his formal retirement in 1979 he continued to meet with informal gatherings of aspiring young scholars in an effort to share his unique insights into Kant's works until 1996.
[5] He was often observed to joke that his prize for an award in teaching excellence was rejected as "nontaxable" by the Internal Revenue Service because it was more appropriately categorized as "unearned".
[5] He also achieved widespread national and international recognition within academic circles for his scholarship, commentary and encyclopedic knowledge of Kant's philosophical works.
Beck observed further that this divergence in meaning accounts for the unfortunate confusion in the minds of many students who explore translations of Kant's works from the original German into English.
[17][20] Beck also asserted that Kant's Critique of Practical Reason has been largely neglected by modern readers and sometimes supplanted in the minds of many scholars by the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.
According to Beck, Kant also parted ways with Hume, however, by insisting that a different rational basis for religious thought can be found in mankind's moral consciousness.
[17][18][20] Beck's scholarly publications also reflect his interest in philosophical topics which are not prima facia directly related to the works of Immanuel Kant.
[25][26] In the later work, Beck traces the evolution of philosophical speculation concerning the presence of intelligent extraterrestrial life forms starting with the ancient writings of Lucretius, Plutarch and Aristotle, to the contributions made by Copernicus and culminating in the modern age within the works Darwin, Immanuel Kant, William Whewell and Marx.
[27] He argues that our ancestors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were plagued by a profound pessimism over the decline of the natural world due to mankind's sinfulness and consequently sought redemption by searching for the presence of "higher beings" within the universe.
[29] He argues further that deeply seated religious, philosophical and existential beliefs are serving to perpetuate the comforting archetypal idea that mankind is not alone in the universe.
In Beck's view, the Platonic idea of a creative yet hidden ultimate reality now functions as a more dominate paradigm in the form of a nervus probandi within our modern systems of thought and ethical values.
The second possible response has been adopted by scholars who accept that such a hidden reality exists and that it can be known through either philosophical reasoning, mystical insight or a combination of both.
Beck argues that Thomas Acquinas, Blaise Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard, William James and Immanuel Kant all adopt variations on this theme In this view, man is a creator of order only within narrow limits and cannot acquire definitive knowledge of the "unknowable beyond."
[32] Beck himself seems partial to this view when he gently reminds his readers that: In addition to receiving fellowships from the Rosenwald Fund in 1937,[34] the Guggenheim Foundation in 1957,[7] the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963,[12] and the American Council of Learned Societies in 1964,[11] Beck was the first recipient of the University Of Rochester's Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1962.
The leading scholar of German philosophy Walter Kaufmann also paid special tribute to Beck's scholarship in his work Goethe, Kant and Hegel in 1980.
[36] During his long academic career, Lewis White Beck published several books and numerous scholarly articles which include the following works.