Background
Tymieniecka, Anna Teresa was born in 1923 in Marianowo, Poland.
Tymieniecka, Anna Teresa was born in 1923 in Marianowo, Poland.
1946, University of Cracow. 1951. the Sorbonne; 1952, University of Fribourg (PhD).
1957, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University. 1961-1966, Associate Scholar, Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. 1972-1973, Professor of Philosophy, St John’s University, Jamaica.
From 1975, President and Roman Ingarden Professor of Philosophy, The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning. Editor, Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research.
Tymieniecka came to phenomenology through Husserl and Ingarden. She dedicated herself to furthering its practice and study, at first by a thorough allegiance to the ideas of her teachers and later through theories of her own that led her to a standpoint she has called ‘the Phenomenology of Life and of the Human Condition in the Unity-of-Everything-There-Is-Alive’. Always taking the human condition as a starting-point, the pursuit of her own ideas led Tymieniecka to proclaim the supreme importance of creative activity in human life. Accordingly, her phenomenological enquiries are largely focused on the personal experience of creativity and its relationship to cosmic principles and dynamic structures. She rejected the Husserlian notion of ‘transcendental consciousness', maintaining instead that ‘initial spontaneity’ is a principle of movement and ‘creative imagination’ the principle responsible for the renewal of structural types in a constitution. From this basis she developed ‘a metaphysics of the creative act’, a poetics in which, in her second work of 1966, she explored what she has described as ‘self-individualizing becoming’, vigorously opposing deconstructionist analyses of literature and asserting the primacy of the ‘life-significance’ of literary works. In the later decades of the twentieth century Tymieniecka has worked to produce a reconstruction of philosophy that has sought to realize Husserl’s dream of phenomenology as a mathesis universalis. She has taken the Husserlian question of the origin of sense as central and has posited the human creative function as the unifying factor that not only bestows meaning but also reveals moral sense as the foundation ol intersubjectivity, as that which mediates communication and as that which is, au fond, the source of the unity of the ‘multiple rationalities of all branches of knowledge. She has rejected an earlier and Leibnizian ontological universalism in favour of a thesis of ‘concrete becoming’, a phenomenology of actual existence. Tymieniecka’s founding and continuing support of The International Husserl and Phenomenological Research Society (1969), The International Society for Phenomenology and Literature (1974), The International Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (1976) and her founding and presidency of the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning in Belmont, Massachusetts (1975-1976) have done much to advance phenomenology. Its dissemination owes a good deal to the yearbook. Analecta Husserliana, also founded by Tymieniecka, in 1968, which she has edited and to which she has contributed unfiaggingly.