Ernst Mally

Background

Mally, Ernst was born on October 11, 1879 in Krainburg.

Views

Much of Maliy’s thought concerns logic and ontology. His influence on these subjects arises primarily out of his Principle of Independence and his two distinctions concerning kinds of property and modes of predication. ‘There are objects of which it is true to say that there are no such objects.’ To overcome this sort of paradoxical proposition. Mally introduced the principle of independence of Sosein and Sein. Merely possible objects such as the Golden Mountain, and impossible objects such as the round square, are not part of the world either concretely, or abstractly; they are nevertheless objects of thought and talk. These objects are neither real and existent, nor ideal and subsistent—they just are. Meinong took this principle over and made it central to his theory of objects. Mally went on to reject it, though it appears in a more sophisticated and developed guise in his two fundamental distinctions. The golden mountain neither exists nor subsists—it falls outside of either mode of Sein. To avoid the naïve principles of abstraction of object and property, Mally introduces his seminal distinction between two kinds of property that can be incorporated in an axiomatic theory of objects: formale properties and ausserformale properties. Possible and impossible objects have their formate properties in their Sosein in the same way as existent and subsistent objects do. Ausserformale properties, on the other hand, are strictly excluded from the Sosein of all objects. By contrast, Mally’s second distinction (which has been called ‘Mally’s Heresy' depends upon two copulas: the ordinary, or ‘satisfying’, and the special, or ‘determining’, what Russell calls a ‘propositional function’. So ‘being golden and mountainous’ is a determination of a possible object, the golden mountain, but it is satisfied neither by an existent nor a subsistent object. It has the property of being golden, though quite differently from the way the Statue of Athene has the property of being a statue. Mally’s paradox of thought has also been much discussed. Can a thought refer to itself? Mally takes this question to be analogous to Russell’s paradox, and argues that it has no legitimate sense at all. since an affirmative answer, like its denial, would lack sense.

Interests

• Philosophy of logic; metaphysics.