Oskar Becker

Oscar Becker (5 September 1889 – 13 November 1964) was a German philosopher, logician, mathematician, and historian of mathematics.

Becker was born in Leipzig, where he studied mathematics. His dissertation under Otto Hölder and Karl Rohn (1914) was On the Decomposition of Polygons in non-intersecting triangles on the Basis of the Axioms of Connection and Order.

He served in World War I and returned to study philosophy with Edmund Husserl, writing his Habilitationsschrift on Investigations of the Phenomenological Foundations of Geometry and their Physical Applications, (1923). Becker was Husserl's assistant, informally, and then official editor of the Yearbook for Phenomenological Research.

He published Mathematical Existence his magnum opus, in the Yearbook in 1927. A famous work that also appeared in the Yearbook that year was Martin Heidegger's Being and Time. Becker frequently attended Heidegger's seminars during those years.

Becker utilized not only Husserlian phenomenology but, much more controversially, Heideggerian hermeneutics, discussing arithmetical counting as "being toward death". His work was criticized both by neo-Kantians and by more mainstream, rationalist logicians, to whom Becker feistily replied. This work has not had great influence on later debates in the foundations of mathematics, despite its many interesting analyses of the topic of its title.

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