Controversy About Actual Existence: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Contribution to the Study of Roman Ingarden’s Philosophy

Abstract

Recalling the opinion expressed by Alfred North Whitehead in “Process and Reality” that each philosophical school needs two philosophers without whom it could not exist, namely its founder and the one who, by bringing the school’s doctrine to perfect unity, achieves reductio ad absurdum, Tymieniecka states: “In a very real sense Roman Ingarden may be said to have fulfilled with respect to Husserl a significant part of this task of clarification which Whitehead calls for. For Ingarden’s philosophical enterprise is at the same time a continuation of the line of thought inaugurated by Husserl and a revolution in the very principles of that philosophy.” (Tymieniecka, 1959, p. 1) Hence Tymieniecka’s claim that in order to have a complete picture of Husserl’s phenomenology we have to consider both of these thinkers. Although the major part of her original philosophy unfolded in the American philosophical climate, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s philosophical “source,” the tradition in which her perception of the world was shaped, was European. A closer look at her scholarly output, leads one to observe that works which she devoted to the philosophy of Roman Ingarden are most significant to the USA. Her lecture at the World Congress of Philosophy in Brussels in 1953 entitled “Roman Ingarden, ou une nouvelle position du probleme idealisme-realisme” (Roman Ingarden, or the New Position of the Idealism-Realism Problem) was the very first time that Ingarden’s thought was directly presented in Western Europe.