Erich Becher

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Erich Becher 1909
Grave in the Becher family grave at the Münster Central Cemetery.

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

life and work

Becher was the son of 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 scientist and his brother Erwin Becher a medical doctor.

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, which were conveyed to him by his parents, developed in him religious, ethical, social, also scientific and technical interests. 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. Also encouraged 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. After that he worked as an assistant for mathematics at J. Sommer, who gave lectures on geodesy there, at the Agricultural Academy in Bonn-Poppelsdorf .

In the summer semester of 1904, Becher finished his studies, in the summer of 1904 he decided to take a state examination for higher education and passed in philosophy, physics and mathematics. Then he began to write his habilitation thesis Philosophical Requirements of the 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 he worked as a professor at the LMU Munich , where he represented vitalism (psychovitalism), 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 the attribute in Spinoza , edited by B. Erdmann, Halle 1905
  • Philosophical prerequisites for the exact natural sciences , Leipzig 1907
  • The basic question of ethics , Cologne no year (1907)
  • Darwinism and social ethics , Leipzig 1909
  • Education for philanthropy and the helper system , Langensalza 1914
  • World buildings, world laws, world development , Berlin 1915
  • The extraneous expediency of the plant galls and the hypothesis of a supra-individual soul , Leipzig 1917
  • Humanities and natural sciences. Investigations on the theory and classification of the real sciences , Berlin 1921
  • German philosophers. Life course and teaching buildings of Kant , Schelling , Fechner , Erdmann , Mach , Stumpf , Bäumker , Eucken , Siegfried Becher . With an outline about: 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

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Aloys Wenzl:  Becher, Erich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1953, ISBN 3-428-00182-6 , p. 688 ( digitized version ).
  2. ↑ Member entry by Erich Becher (with a link to an obituary) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on January 6, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Becher, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher and psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 1, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Remscheid
DATE OF DEATH January 5, 1929
Place of death Munich