Maximilian or Max Beck was born to a German speaking family on February 14, 1887, in Plzeň (in the western part of the modern Czech Republic), where he attended the deutsche Volksschule and the Staatsgymnasium. In 1900, he enrolled at the University of Munich to study philology, but under the influence of the teaching of Alexander Pfänder and the Akademischer Verein für Psychologie und Philosophie, he decided to dedicate himself to philosophy.
He graduated on January 18, 1915, with a thesis on the logical problem of the implication-relation between judgments (Beck 1916).