Roman Ingarden 1893 – 1970

Roman Ingarden was a Polish philosopher and a student of Edmund Husserl, the most distinguished representative of phenomenology in twentieth-century Polish philosophy. He broke with Husserl over the latter's transcendental idealism, defending a realist phenomenology in his monumental Controversy over the Existence of the World. His other major writings developed a phenomenological aesthetics and ontology of the work of art, especially the literary work, in which the work is understood as a stratified intentional formation that the reader concretizes. He spent the war years in occupied Poland writing his major realist treatise.