Oskar Becker

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 published his major work, Mathematical Existence in the Yearbook in 1927, the same year Martin Heidegger's Being and Time appeared there.

Becker was correct that complete induction was needed for assertions of consistency in the form of universally quantified sentences, as opposed to claiming that a predicate holds for each individual natural number.

[1] Although fundamentally different this usage has provided some minor influences in the term "paraontology" in English made more recently by Nahum Chandler, Fred Moten, and others, in discussing blackness.

Becker, as did several others, emphasized the "crisis" in Greek mathematics occasioned by the discovery of incommensurability of the side of the pentagon (or in the later, simpler proofs, the triangle) by Hippasus of Metapontum, and the threat of (literally) "irrational" numbers.

Hermeneutics of the Heideggerian sort is applicable to individual lived existence, but "mantic" decipherment is necessary not only in mathematics, but in aesthetics, and the investigation of the unconscious.

These included Ackermann, Adolf Fraenkel (later Abraham), Arend Heyting, David Hilbert, John von Neumann, Hermann Weyl, and Ernst Zermelo among mathematicians, as well as Hans Reichenbach and Felix Kaufmann among philosophers.

It is possible that regard for Becker's earlier work suffered from his later Nazi allegiances, leading to lack of reference or published commentary by émigré logicians and mathematicians who had fled Hitlerism.

[4] Two able philosophers who were students of Becker, Jürgen Habermas and Hans Sluga, later grappled with the issue of the influence of Nazism on German academia.