Mach, Ernst(1838–1916)
Mach, Ernst, Austrian physicist and philosopher, was born at Turas near Brno, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic). As with many great figures, a profound psychological experience in youth had lasting effect. Mach describes it in The Analysis of Sensations:
I have always felt it as a stroke of special good fortune that early in life, at about the age of fifteen, I lighted, in the library of my father, on a copy of Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. The book made at the time a powerful and ineffaceable impression upon me, the like of which I never afterwards experienced in any of my philosophical reading. Some two or three years later the superfluity of the role played by "the thing in itself" abruptly dawned on me. On a bright summer day in the open air, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego. Although the actual working out of this thought did not occur until a later period, yet this moment was decisive for my whole view.
Examination of Mach's life and work confirms this statement. Fired by the stimulus, he studied in Vienna and became professor of mathematics at Graz in 1864.
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