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 also published four books on philosophy, the most notable of which is On Being Human, a translation of 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.