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Erich Becher

Grave in the Becher family grave at the central cemetery in Münster.

Erich Becher (1 September 1882 in Reinshagen at Remscheid; † 5 January 1929 in Munich) was a German philosopher and psychologist.

Life and work

Becher was the son of the elementary school teacher Ernst Becher and his wife Hulda, whose parents were the grinder Peter Daniel Küpper (1821-1862) and Amalie Tesche (1829-1880). His brother Hellmut Becher was an anatomist and university professor, his brother Ernst Siegfried Becher a natural scientist. [1]

Becher attended elementary school from 1889 to 1893 and from 1893 the secondary school in Remscheid, which he left in 1901. Suggestions from art, science and religion that were conveyed to him through his parents' house developed religious, ethical, social, also scientific and technical interests in him. At Easter 1901, he went to the University of Bonn and attended lectures in mathematics, physics, economics and philosophy with Benno Erdmann, who inspired him to write his first printed work on a "treatise on the concept of attributes" by Spinoza, which was published in 1903. Likewise stimulated by Erdmann, he completed his dissertation on the psychology of life in the winter of 1903/1904 and received a doctorate in philosophy, physics and mathematics in February 1904. Afterwards he worked as an assistant for mathematics with J. Sommer, who gave lectures there on geodesy, at the Agricultural Academy in Bonn-Poppelsdorf.

In the summer semester of 1904 Becher finished his studies, in the summer of 1904 decided to take a state examination for higher education and consisted in philosophy, physics and mathematics. Then he began to write his habilitation thesis on Philosophical Requirements of Exact Natural Sciences. In 1907 Becher became a private lecturer in philosophy at the University of Bonn and in the same year completed a paper on The Basic Questions of Ethics.

In autumn 1909 he was appointed full professor at the University of Münster. From 1916 to 1929 worked as a professor at the LMU Munich, where he represented vitalism (psychovitalism) by assuming that there is a supra-individual soul that is distributed in all organisms. His assistant from 1920 to 1926 was the musicologist Kurt Huber, who later became a member of the White Rose. Since 1924 Becher was a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

Works (selection)

• The concept of attributes in Spinoza, edited by B. Erdmann, Halle 1905
• Philosophical requirements of the exact natural sciences, Leipzig 1907
• The basic question of ethics, Cologne undated (1907)
• Darwinism and Social Ethics, Leipzig 1909
• Education to love people and help system, Langensalza 1914
• World Buildings, World Laws, World Development, Berlin 1915
• The external usefulness of the plant bile and the hypothesis of a supra-individual soul, Leipzig 1917
• Humanities and natural sciences. Studies on the theory and classification of the real sciences, Berlin 1921
• German philosophers. The curriculum vitae and teaching building of Kant , Schelling , Fechner , Erdmann , Mach , Stumpf , Bäumker , Eucken , Siegfried Becher . With an outline of: The Philosophy of the Present by Erich Becher and with an introduction: Erich Becher's development and position in the Philosophy of the Present by Aloys Fischer. Leipzig 1929

Literature

• Raimund Schmidt (ed., Einf.): The German philosophy of the present in self-portrayals. First volume: Paul Barth / Erich Becher / Hans Driesch / [[Karl Joël (philosopher) | Karl Joël] ] / Alexius Meinong / Paul Natorp / Johannes Rehmke / Johannes Volkelt. Published by Felix Meiner, Leipzig 1921
• Aloys Wenzl (1953), "Becher, Erich", Neue Deutsche Biographie (in German), vol. 1, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 688–689; (116099453.html full text online)
• Wilhelm Schuwerack: Erich Becher's concept of science and educational science, in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch 59 (1949) 35–50.

Weblinks

• Literature by and about Williams Anderson Byrne/sandbox1 in the German National Library catalogue

References

Category:20th-century philosophers Category:Academic staff of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Category:Academic staff of the University of Münster Category:Members of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences Category:People from Remscheid Category:1882 births Category:1929 deaths Category:Men