Ernst Mally - Life

Life

Mally was born in the town of Kranj (German: Krainburg) in the Duchy of Carniola, Austria-Hungary (now in Slovenia). His father was of Slovene origin, but identified himself with Austrian German culture (he also Germanized the orthography of his surname, originally spelled Mali, a common Slovene surname of Upper Carniola). After his death, the family moved to the Carniolan capital of Ljubljana (German: Laibach). There, Ernst attended the prestigious Ljubljana German language Gymnasium. Already at a young age, Mally became a fervent supporter of the Pan-German nationalist movement of Georg von Schönerer. In the same time, he developed an interest in philosophy.

In 1898 he enrolled to the University of Graz, where he studied philosophy under the supervision of Alexius Meinong, as well as physics and mathematics, specializing in formal logic. He graduated in 1903 with a thesis entitled Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie des Messens (Investigations in the Object Theory of Measurement). In 1906 he started teaching at a high school in Graz, at the same time working Meinong's assistant at the university. He also maintained close contacts with the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology, founded by Meinong. In 1912, he wrote his faculty-rank (Habilitation) thesis entitled Gegenstandstheoretische Grundlagen der Logik und Logistik (Object-theoretic Foundations for Logics and Logistics) with Meinong as supervisor.

From 1915 to 1918 he served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. After the end of World War I, Mally joined the Greater German People's Party, which called the unification of German Austria with Germany. In the same period, he started teaching at the university and in 1925 he took over Meinong's chair. In 1938, he became a member of the National Socialist Teachers' Association and two months after the Anschluss he joined the NSDAP. He continued teaching during the Nazi administration of Austria until 1942 when he retired. He died in 1944.