Background
Ingarden, Roman was born on February 5, 1893 in Cracow, Poland.
Phenomenological philosopher Realist
Ingarden, Roman was born on February 5, 1893 in Cracow, Poland.
1^12-17, studied in Germany under Edmund Husserl, first at the University of Göttingen (from *’'2) and then at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau (from 1916). tnfts: Bergson and Husserl.
1924, Privatdozent, °hn Casimir University of Lvov in oland. 1933, Associate Professor. 1935, Full rofessor; 1945-1963, Professor, Jagiellonian UniVersi‘y, Cracow.
From 1963, Emeritus fofessor at the University of Cracow, and Honorary Professor of the University of Lvov.
Although Ingarden is perhaps best known to English speakers for his philosophy of aesthetics, this needs to be seen within the perspective of his lifelong concern with the problems of epistemology and ontology. In his dissertation on Bergson, for example, he interprets such Bergsonian themes as the flux of consciousness and its immediate givens in the light of the phenomenologically based epistemological framework of consciousness, content of consciousness and object of consciousness. His ‘Essentiale Fragen’ (1925) is likewise a work in which he is concerned to delimit the field of phenomenology by a systematic demonstration of the existence of such objective essences as are implied by ‘essential questions’ of the type ‘ What is x?’. Gilbert Ryle reviewed this work sympathetically in Mind36 ( 1927), although he pointed out that Ingarden admits to being unable to solve the old problem of how an inftma species can realise itself in concrete individuals. The alien, neo-Kantian climate of Freiburg brought Ingarden and Husserl very close together and, although Ingarden returned to Poland at the end of the First World War and did not see Husserl again until 1927, the two philosophers remained lifelong friends and correspondents. Ingarden perhaps kept in closer touch with Husserl’s developing thought than any other of the latter’s Gottingen students, but it was always the objects of consciousness which preoccupied him and not, as it came to be with Husserl, the intentional analysis of consciousness itself. In his ‘Bemerkungen zum Problem "Idealismus-Realismus"’ (1929) Ingarden’s argument is that it is necessary first to investigate the mode of being of objects before drawing conclusions about their relationship to, and possible dependency upon, consciousness. Perhaps Ingarden's most original phenomenological work has been in the analysis of various works of art. beginning with his book The Literary Work of Art (1931) where, utilizing a theory developed by Alexander Pfander on the basis of suggestions by Husserl, he first discloses the various strata of intentional constituents which interact to form the ‘harmonious polyphony’ of each art work. However, Ingardens interest in the philosophy of art arose out of his concern with the ontological problem of idealism-realism, and The Literary Work of Art is actually subtitled An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic and Theory of LiteratureIngarden’s ontological position in this work is that, since works of art are created by human subjects, they are—and may be perceived to be—ontically heteronomous objects. In contradistinction, real objects and the objects of mathematics do not depend upon consciousness. They are self-sufficient or ontically autonomous. Ingarden's chef-d'oeuvre is almost certainly his massive, three-volume Spor o istnienia swiata [The Controversy About the Existence of the World]- Volume I, ‘Existential ontology’, concerns the modal analysis of real, ideal and possible beingVolume II, ‘Formal ontology', has two parts. Pad II/l is called ‘Form and Essence’ and Part II/- ‘World and Consciousness’. These first two volumes are reviewed by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka in Mind 56 (1957). He did not live to complete the culminating Volume III, ‘Material ontology’, but in 1974 a contribution to it was published posthumously in German called 'O1* the causal structure of the real world’. The fu" import of these remarkable volumes has yet to be assessed, but it is clear that Ingarden has done much work towards an ontology based on what is given to consciousness which avoids any recourse to transcendental idealism.