Ernst Mally

Ernst Mally was an Austrian philosopher and logician, a student of Alexius Meinong and later professor at the University of Graz. His Grundgesetze des Sollens of 1926 was the first attempt to build a formal logic of obligation, the field now called deontic logic. The system turned out to have unacceptable consequences, notably collapsing what ought to be the case into what is the case, but it set the problem that later deontic logics tried to solve.

Key ideas

• Norms and obligations can be treated with the formal methods of logic, not only discussed informally.
• His deontic system, built on an operator for 'ought', was shown to make 'it ought to be that p' equivalent to 'p', a defect that later systems avoided.
• In the theory of objects he distinguished two ways an object can relate to a property, an idea later developed in formal theories of abstract objects.

Major works

• Gegenstandstheoretische Grundlagen der Logik und Logistik (1912)
• Grundgesetze des Sollens: Elemente der Logik des Willens (1926)

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