This essay critically assesses Roman Ingarden’s 1915 review of the second edition of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations. I elucidate and critique Ingarden’s analysis of the differences between the 1901 first edition and the 1913 second edition. I specifically examine three tenets of Ingarden’s interpretation. First, I demonstrate that Ingarden correctly denounces Husserl’s claim that he only engages in an eidetic study of consciousness in 1913, as Husserl was already performing eidetic analyses in 1901. Second, I show that Ingarden is misguided, (...) when he asserts that Husserl had fully transformed his philosophy into a transcendental idealism in the second edition. While Husserl does appear to adopt a transcendental phenomenology by asserting–in his programmatic claims–that the intentional content and object are now included in his domain of research, he does not alter his actual descriptions of the intentional relationship in any pertinent manner. Third, I show Ingarden correctly predicts many of the insights Husserl would arrive at about logic in his late philosophy. This analysis augments current readings of the evolution of Ingarden’s philosophy, by more closely examining the development of his largely neglected early thought. I execute this critical assessment by drawing both from Husserl’s later writings and from recent literature on the Investigations. By doing so, I hope to additionally demonstrate how research on the Investigations has matured in the one hundred years since the release of that text, while also presenting my own views concerning these difficult interpretative issues. (shrink)

Samuel Alexander was an important figure in the rise of realism in the early twentieth century. Alongside Moore and Russell he forwarded the cause of realism in England with a systematic exposition of a realist metaphysics in his magnum opus Space, Time and Deity (1920). This volume is a collection of essays on Alexander’s philosophy, ranging from his metaphysics of spacetime, theory of categories, epistemology and account of perception, naturalism, and interpretations of reactions by R.G. Collingwood and John Anderson.

Ingarden’s phenomenology of aesthetics is characterised primarily as a realist ontological approach which is secondarily concerned with acts of consciousness. This approach leads to a stark contrast between spatiotemporal objects and literary objects. Ontologically, the former is autonomous, totally determined, and in possession of infinite attributes, whilst the latter is a heteronomous intentional object that has only limited determinations and infinitely many “spots of indeterminacy.” Although spots of indeterminacy are often discussed, the role they play in contrasting the real and (...) literary object is not often disputed. Through a close reading of Ingarden’s ontological works and texts on aesthetics, this essay contests the purity of Ingarden’s ontological approach and the ensuing disparity between real and literary object, particularly on the question of spots of indeterminacy. I do this by demonstrating the following five theses: 1) Ingarden’s claim that the real object has an infinitude of properties belies an epistemology, and we should instead conclude that ontologically the real object’s properties are finite. 2) Ingarden’s a priori argument that absent properties of real objects are ontologically determined is unsound. 3) The radical difference between the infinitude and finitude of givenness and absence of the real and the literary object ought to be relativised. 4) Indeterminacies within the novel are concretised in much the same way that absent properties of real objects are intended. 5) Literature makes claims that have a truth value that we can attribute to their author. (shrink)

Ingarden conceives ontology as a philosophia prima, which deals with being as purely possible. It is an intuitive and a priori analysis of the content of the relevant ideas. It consists of three parts: existential, formal and material ontology. Existential ontology deals with the possible modes of existence. Problems of factual existence pertain to metaphysics, which is a separate branch of theoretical philosophy, based on ontology.

The article addresses the popular reading of Ingarden that his aesthetic theory is determined by ontology. This reading seems to suggest that, firstly, aesthetics lacks its autonomy, and, secondly, the subject of aesthetic experience is reproductive, and passive. The author focuses on Ingarden’s aesthetics formulated by him in the period of 1925–1944. Moreover, the study presents selected elements of Ingarden’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience, and by doing so, the author aims at showing how Ingarden’s aesthetics was reconsidered by Blaustein, a (...) student of Ingarden, whose theory seems to lead one beyond the scope of ontology. Blaustein, namely, reconsiders Ingarden’s theory of purely intentional objects by interpreting it in a descriptive-psychological, or phenomenological fashion. The article is divided into four parts. In section 1, the author highlights historical interconnections between Ingarden, and Blaustein. Section 2.1. is devoted to Ingarden’s phenomenological approach towards aesthetic experience as a phasic structure. At this basis, in section 2.2., Ingarden’s early theory of intentional objects is to be discussed. Section 3 concerns Blaustein’s contribution to phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Given that Blaustein formulates his theory in discussion with Ingarden, section 3.1. is devoted to Blaustein’s critical assessment of Ingarden’s method, and aesthetics. Next, in section 3.2., the author presents Blaustein’s original theory of presentations, and its use in aesthetics. Finally, in section 4, the author lists similarities, and differences between Blaustein’s and Ingarden’s aesthetic theories. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to Kazimierz Twardowski's thesis that the unity of a compound object (a whole) can be ensured only by the relations between its parts and the object itself. Twardowski's idea of unity raises many difficulties, especially the threat of petitio principii: the whole is presupposed as furnishing the ground for the unification of its parts, and yet it also seems to be the result of this unification. To avoid these problems, Edmund Husserl sought to refute Twardowski's thesis, (...) and ascribed the role of a principle of unity to the foundational relationships which directly hold between the parts of a whole. Roman Ingarden then seemed to return to Twardowski's concept of unity, but employed it within a different theory of objects, according to which to be an object is to be a subject of properties. I seek to demonstrate that: (1) Twardowski's thesis is sound if a compound object is something over and above its parts; (2) with respect to Husserl's solution, it is not clear as to whether the whole is really something over and above its parts; (3) Ingarden's conception of the subject‐properties structure saves Twardowski's thesis; (4) Ingarden's theory of higher‐order objects is invalid. (shrink)

In this paper I present the Ingardenian distinction between inseparability and dependence. My considerations are both historical and systematic. The historical part of the paper accomplishes two goals. First, I show that in the Brentanian tradition the problem of existential conditioning was entangled into parts—whole theories. The best examples of such an approach are Kazimierz Twardowski’s theory of the object and Edmund Husserl’s theory of parts and wholes. Second, I exhibit the context within which Ingarden distinguished inseparability and dependence. Moreover, (...) Ingarden’s motivations are presented: the problem of understanding the Husserlian concept of “immanent transcendence,” the issue of the existence of purely intentional objects, and finally the problem of the relationship between individual objects and ideas. The systematic part deals with the ambiguity of Ingarden’s definition of inseparability. I seek to improve this definition by reference to the distinction between absolute and summative wholes. I also present some divisions of inseparability and dependence and investigate whether these types of existential conditioning are reflexive, symmetric, or transitive. (shrink)

While Roman Ingarden remains best known among English‐speaking philosophers and literary theorists for his work in aesthetics, and primarily for his study of the literary work of art, his studies in aesthetics and art belong in fact to the comprehensive program of phenomenological research in ontology and metaphysics that occupied him for his entire career. In this article I briefly describe this program of phenomenological research, then I discuss some of the major features of Ingarden’s analyses of works of art (...) and the aesthetic experience. (shrink)

In the present paper, I suggest a modification to some aspects of Ingarden’s analyses of the sound-synchronized filmic work of art. The argument progresses through two stages: I clarify Ingarden’s claim that the work of art is a stratified formation in which the various aspects present objectivities; I elucidate and critically assess Ingarden’s suggestion that the filmic work of art is a borderline case in respect to other types of works of art—paintings and literary works. Here, I identify a problem (...) with Ingarden’s claims about the function of sound in the concretized filmic work’s presentation of its fictive world. Ingarden identifies the presented universe of the filmic work of art as a habitus of reality, but Ingarden seems oddly conflicted with respect to his notion of habitus. I argue that this stems from Ingarden’s conceptualization of the filmic work of art as primarily composed of the stratum of represented “visible aspects” in both the cases of the silent film and the sound-synchronized film, and his restriction of the role of phonetic content in the latter. I suggest that were we to reconceptualise the role of aurally presented phonetic content in the concretized sound-synchronized film, we could better understand how film has the seeming magical capacity to transfix us. (shrink)

The paper ends with an argument that says: necessarily, if there are finitely spatially extended particulars, then there are monadic universals. Before that, in order to characterize the distinction between particulars and universals, Roman Ingarden’s notions of existential moments and modes (ways) of being are presented, and a new pair of such existential moments is introduced: multiplicity–monadicity. Also, it is argued that there are not only real universals, but instances of universals (tropes) and fictional universals too.

Husserl’s allegiance to realism came under attack following his Ideas. Ingarden was a fierce critic of his teacher’s turn to transcendental idealism and provided compelling arguments both for his idealist reading of Husserl and for his rejection of idealism. One of the main arguments Ingarden devised against Husserl’s turn was based on his aesthetics. Against Husserl, Ingarden established literary works and fictional objects as purely intentional objects that are (1) doubly structured, vis-à-vis their formal ontology, and (2) endowed with spots (...) of indeterminacy. These facts, Ingarden argues, necessitate the transcendence of the purely intentional object. In this paper, I explore his argument, while establishing the ontological foundation on which it rests. (shrink)

The time of the literary work of art is a schematized aspect of the represented objectivities of the literary work. Roman Ingarden’s analysis of the time of the literary work extends upon Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness but nevertheless remains consistent with it, insofar as within a literary work as well as actuality, an objective time or literary objective time is constituted from an experience of temporal objects. The time of the literary work of art is experienced through its represented (...) objectivities and depends on an already existent concept of objective time. The time of the literary work, however, gains an indeterminacy, as the author of the literary work is able to manipulate our experience of time within the literary work by predicting how the reader will concretize its events, characters, and objects with respect to time. I use Alain Robbe-Grillet’s representation of the centipede in La Jalousie as an example of the possible manipulations of time, explicable through Ingarden’s analysis of time in the literary work of art. (shrink)

This thesis explores the ethical impact of literary narrative fictions on the reader. It does so by focusing mainly on the reading experience since one of the main claims of the thesis is that literary narrative fictions are co-products of the author and the reader. In that sense the aforementioned impact cannot be understood without taking into account the creative acts of the reader. The exploration is carried out by focusing on three scholars whose investigations on the problem of literary (...) experience can be read as complementary works. In the first chapter I descriptively lay out Roman Ingarden’s investigation on the ontological and structural character of the literary work of art along with his phenomenological inquiry into the cognition of this work. By examining his basic claims about the nature of the literary work of art and its cognition, I discuss the ontological incompleteness of these works which necessitates the active role of the reader in giving the work its final shape. In the second chapter I focus upon Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory. Iser’s theory goes parallel to Ingarden’s in the sense that they both accept the openness of the work to the creative acts of the reader. Iser, however by his notions of depragmatization, negation and negativity suggest us a two-way traffic between the fictional work and the reader. Through the reading proses, by virtue of the negations and de-pragmatizations, the work invites the reader to reflect on the familiar norms it represents and suggest to her a new model to understand the real world. In this way, while giving a shape to the work, the reader is also shaped by it. The third chapter addresses the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. By exploring his notion of “narrative identity” as a mediator between the ipse and idem identities, my aim is to show the influence of the literary fictional narratives in understanding the identity of the individual subject as a temporal, historical, and intersubjective being. It is only through this understanding that we can construe the subject in her ethical identity. I will also focus on Ricoeur’s notions of “emplotment,” and “threefold mimesis,” which implies the active role of the reader in realizing the literary narrative fiction, so that I can reveal how fictional narratives enhance the notion of narrative identity. (shrink)

I argue that Kafka's writings express the idea that our sense of freedom is deceptive. It is deceptive because we cannot discern any proper purpose or destination that would allow us to make truly meaningful choices. Kafka's thought here relates to the existentialist view of Kierkegaard, but it radicalizes that view by depriving it of its teleological dimension.