Fritz Marti Papers, 1909-2009

Fritz Marti was born January 1, 1894 in Winterthur, Switzerland. After serving in the Swiss Army during World War I, Marti earned two degrees in Mechanical Engineering (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 1917, 1918) before completing his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Bern (1922) under the tutelage of Fritz Medicus.

Marti's teaching experience began at the University of Oregon in 1923, and took him to 11 institutions of higher learning before his retirement from Southern Illinois University in 1974. In the meantime, Marti and his wife also founded the Marti School, a college preparatory academy in Ohio, now known as the Miami Valley School.

Marti published four books on philosophy, the most notable of which is On Being Human: The Life of Truth and Its Realization, a translation of work by his mentor Fritz Medicus. His scholarship focused primarily upon post-Kantian idealism, but Marti was also widely respected in Hegelian circles and indeed "well versed in all sorts of speculative philosophy, especially Catholic philosophy and Continental rationalism." Marti was also considered an expert on the work of Friedrich Schelling.

Fritz Marti died in 1991 at the age of 98.

The Marti collection is divided into three series.

The first series, titled "Individual Correspondence and Articles," consists of letters, newspaper clippings (especially obituaries) and an array of other background materials concerning specific individuals with whom Marti had occasion to interact. Marti's correspondence with his family is held at the end of this series.

The bulk of Marti's scholarly output is located in series 2, "Notebooks, Scholarly Manuscripts and Research Interests." Highlights of this series include the dozens of high school-era research notebooks that Marti saved, as well a substantial collection of scholarly manuscripts dating from the late 1920s to the late 1980s. Special attention likewise has been paid to Marti's work on Fritz Medicus and F. W. J. Schelling.

A wide assortment of materials related to Marti's non-academic life have been arranged into series 3, "Biographical Materials, Organizational Affiliations and Financial Records." Here researchers will find a handful of biographical and autobiographical manuscripts, as well as photographs of Marti, his family and colleagues. Materials related to Marti's upbringing and life-long interest in Switzerland are also located in series 3, as are a small collection of records related to Marti's finances and organizational affiliations, including The Marti School.