Roman Ingarden

Ingarden was born in Kraków, Austria-Hungary, on February 5, 1893.[3] He first studied mathematics and philosophy at the Lwów University under Kazimierz Twardowski, then moved to the University of Göttingen to study philosophy under Edmund Husserl. He was considered by Husserl to be one of his best students and accompanied Husserl to the University of Freiburg, where in 1918 Ingarden submitted his doctoral dissertation with Husserl as director.[4] The title of his thesis was Intuition und Intellekt bei Henri Bergson (Intuition and Intellect in Henri Bergson). Ingarden previously suggested that he transfer to Lwów and write a new dissertation under Twardowski due to an increasing tension between Germany and Poland but Husserl refused.[5]

Ingarden then returned to Poland, where he spent his academic career after obtaining his doctorate. For a long period, he had to support himself by secondary-school teaching. During this period, one of his works - aside from his post-doctoral work in epistemology - was a review of the Festschrift written for Twardowski. This involved an analysis of Zygmunt Lempicki's "W sprawie uzasadnienia poetyki czystej" (On the Justification of Pure Poetics).[6]

In 1925 he submitted his Habilitationschrift, Essentiale Fragen (Essential Questions), to Kazimierz Twardowski at Lwów University. This thesis was noticed by the English-speaking philosophical community.[7][8] In 1933, the University promoted him as professor of philosophy.[7] He became well known for his work on The Literary Work of Art (Das literarische Kunstwerk. Eine Untersuchung aus dem Grenzgebiet der Ontologie, Logik und Literaturwissenschaft, 1931).[4]

From 1939 to 1941 during the Soviet occupation of Lwów he continued his university activity and lived in the Kraków area.[7] After the Operation Barbarossa 1941 under the German occupation Ingarden secretly taught students mathematics and philosophy. After his house was bombed, he continued work on his book, The Controversy over the Existence of the World.[4]

Ingarden became a professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in 1945 shortly after the war but was banned in 1946 because of the Communist government. He then moved to the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where he was offered a position.[7] In 1949, however, he was banned from teaching due to his alleged idealism, supposedly being an "enemy of materialism".[9] In 1957 he was reappointed at the Jagiellonian University after the ban was lifted, and so he went on to teach, write and publish.

Ingarden died on June 14, 1970, in Kraków as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage.[4]

Ingarden was a realist phenomenologist and thus did not accept Husserl's transcendental idealism. His training was phenomenological; nonetheless, his work as a whole was directed towards ontology. That is why Ingarden is one of the most renowned phenomenological ontologists, as he strove to describe the ontological structure and state of being of various objects based on the essential features of any experience that could provide such knowledge.

The best-known works of Ingarden, and the only ones widely-known to English-speaking readers, concern aesthetics and literature. His most popular book, for instance, was The Literary Work of Art, which explored the concept of the literary work of art.[6] In this book, Ingarden argued that a literary work of art is a purely intentional object and is a product of the author's conscious acts.[6] This work would contribute to the development of the literary theory called reader-response criticism and influence scholars such as René Wellek and Wolfgang Iser.[9]

The exclusive focus on Ingarden's work in aesthetics does not reflect Ingarden's overall philosophical standpoint, which is focused on the ideas regarding formal, existential, and material ontology set forth in his Controversy over the Existence of the World. In his aesthetic investigations, Ingarden considered aesthetics as an integral part of philosophy. He argued that his aesthetic theory is not only an analysis of art but an approach that answers basic philosophical issues.[10] Ingarden also attempted to establish a phenomenological circle at Lvov. The group, which focused on aesthetics and descriptive psychology, attracted some of Twardowski's students including Leopold Blaustein and Eugénie Ginsberg.[11] Ingarden was a close associate of Edith Stein. He came to her defense when her work with Husserl was challenged.[12]

Ingarden wrote his own biography in 1949. This work, which was written in third person, was one of the three biographies he submitted to Tatarkiewicz, who was then revising his Historia filozofii (History of philosophy).[5] The philosopher had also undertaken work for Husserl.[5]

• History of philosophy in Poland
• List of Poles

• J. Mitscherling Roman Ingarden's Ontology and Aesthetics, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997.
• Robert Magliola, "Part II, Chapter 2: Roman Ingarden," in Robert Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction (Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1977; 1978), pp. 107-141 [see review by W. Wolfgang Holdheim in Diacritics, Vol. 9, No. 2 (summer 1979), via JSTOR, here https://www.jstor.org/pss/464782].

• The Roman Ingarden Philosophical Research Centre
• Amie Thomasson. "Roman Ingarden". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Polish Philosophy Page: Roman Ingarden
• Theory and History of Ontology: Roman Ingarden: Ontology as a Science on the Possible Ways of Existence
• Annotated bibliography of and about Ingarden
• "Roman Ingarden’s Objectivity vs. Subjectivity as a problem of Translatability", by Gabriel Pareyon
• Roman Ingarden at Porta Polonica
• Realistic Phenomenology, in Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Kluwer, 1997, 586–590.