Abstract

As a Swiss-born Austro-German philosopher who taught in Czernowitz and in Prague, Marty was not only a cosmopolitan thinker; he had also an exceptional knowledge of the history of philosophy and well-informed inclinations towards specific branches of the discipline. He was influenced by Aristotle, the Scholastics, and early modern philosophers (both rationalists and empiricists), and was unsympathetic towards Kant and German Idealism. Yet his main intellectual inspiration came from his master Franz Brentano, whose conception of philosophy as a science—especially his fourth habilitation thesis—made a lasting impression on many of his students, most prominently on Marty and Stumpf. By way of presenting the contributions to this volume, we offer here a general outline of Marty’s life and works, of his Brentanian upbringing, and we sketch some of his central ideas in philosophy—more precisely on mind, language, and their ontology, with regards to the themes discussed in the contributions.