Stephen Francis Barker

Stephen Francis Barker (January 11, 1927 – December 16, 2019 ) was an American philosopher of mathematics, a professor emeritus of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. He was also a faculty member at the University of Southern California, the University of Virginia and Ohio State University.

He was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 1948, he served in the Navy for a year. He then proceeded in 1949 to earn a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College. He got his master's degree as well as Ph.D in philosophy from Harvard University in 1951 and 1954 respectively. While at Harvard, he won the Bechtel Prize in 1951 for his essay, "A Study of Phenomenalism". Philosophy of mathematics (Prentice-Hall, 1964). Part of a series of books (edited by Elizabeth and Monroe Beardsley) overviewing the main areas of philosophy, this book describes the main problems in the philosophy of mathematics and evaluates their proposed solutions. Its five chapters concern Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, and literalist and non-literalist views on the meaning of numbers. The elements of logic (McGraw Hill, 1965) Thomas Reid critical interpretations (with Tom L. Beauchamp, Philosophical monographs, 1976)

In addition, he edited John Wisdom's Proof and explanation: the Virginia lectures (University Press of America, 1991), co-edited The Legacy of logical positivism; studies in the philosophy of science with Peter Achinstein (Johns Hopkins Press, 1969),