In her excellent introductory essay to the collection of articles on one hundred years of Polish literary theory, Danuta Ulicka makes a statement that the modern Central European literary theory was born in non-academic spaces, such as cafés, cabarets, and private homes, and not only scholars per se were involved in the emergence of this movement: scholars went hand in hand with artists, and even more, artists created theories, scholars were artists by passion. The formal blended with the informal:It was born and developed not at the universities with their stabilized hierarchies and customs. And even if the crystallizing theory was also connected to academic institutions, it was rather not connected to lecture halls. It appropriated more private spaces. Proper spaces for theory were rather professorial “privatissima” and home seminars.1Collaterally, Ulicka, one of the most important specialists on Roman Ingarden in the world, edited and published a book which illustrates or proves her point. Lwowskie czwartki Romana W. Ingardena [The Lviv Thursdays of Roman W. Ingarden] was edited from a typescript deposited in the library of the Institute of Literary Research in Warsaw in 2007. The typescript is a copy of handwritten protocols that were more or less meticulously compiled by shifting participants of Ingarden's Thursday seminars from 1934 to 1937. These seminars were precisely “privatissima” (this term appears in the typescripts), they were half-private, did not end with exams, instead sometimes ended with soirées and artistic performances. Most importantly, not only Ingarden's students, or philosophy students, not only philosophers, nor even exclusively scholars participated in those seminars. Among the participants there were psychologists (Władysław Witwicki), music theorists (Zofia Lissa), literary scholars (Juliusz Kleiner), or writers and literary critics (Ostap Ortwin, Karol Irzykowski). One could say that this is understandable given that these seminars were devoted to aesthetics, however I agree with Ulicka that this shows how “theory” and “practice” were interwoven, and also how anti-hierarchical such knowledge-production in fact was. Moreover, Ingarden himself was a passionate artistic photographer and also a pianist and a violinist (Ulicka dubs him amateur virtuose), he also tried writing poetry. Władysław Witwicki, on the other hand, Ingarden's friend and polemicist in theoretical matters, was also a translator of Plato and others, as well as a painter, drafter, and sculptor who illustrated his books and translations (without going too deep in details, I must confess I was never an Ingardenist when it comes to the beliefs on the ontological nature of works of art, while I found myself here sympathizing with Witwicki's camp). Some of the most inspiring questions I found in the protocols came from non-philosophers: the linguist Zygmunt Rysiewicz, a twenty-five-year-old MA at the time, during a discussion of realism in literature stated that “a realist author is the one who provokes the reader to take a point of naive realism towards the represented world” (p. 229). Or Ostap Ortwin—a lawyer by education, writer and literary critic by practice—who asked whether “we could treat the author's psyche as the represented world” (i.e., like the fictional world represented in a work of art, in the English tradition the concept of “setting” is employed, however I think in this context it misses the pun) (p. 291).Each year the seminars had a different central topic. I cannot say I found all the discussions equally immersive. Neither am I sure if they have always much substantive value (as compared to reading the finished works, books, and papers, by the participants), however this is not the point here. These discussions show an academic culture of debate and curiously enough they resemble to an extent Plato's dialogues in this respect. They also prove the theory developed by another scholar from Lviv, Ludwik Fleck (I am actually curious why he is absent in this circle), that ideas in science are usually not “discovered” just so by an isolated genius, they are to some extent a product of “thought collective.”2 In the protocols from 1934, I found the discussion on the decorative in art quite compelling. At some point I actually felt the desire to take the floor and explain to all the others how I see things . . . with my contemporary theoretical eye. Similarly in the next year I found the discussion of Wölfflin's aesthetics of interest. As for other topics in 1934/1935 and 1935/1936, they gravitate to Ingarden's original ideas on the philosophy of literature, even the same poems are raised as in the published works. In this context I thought that some parts of the discussion could be useful in teaching. There is an urban legend about Ingarden. Freshmen who take the course of poetics usually start with Aristotle and they say that he is too difficult to understand; yet when in the next move they have to read Ingarden, they realize how easy to read Aristotle actually was. The image of Ingarden that comes from his writings is that of a cold, dead serious, inhuman academic. If we show students “Ingarden the human” as he is discussing his theories vividly, perhaps we can frighten fewer young students.These protocols had a utilitarian purpose, each seminar started with reading the protocol from the previous one. Therefore, they document only the substantive topics, inevitably they are abridged. No private remarks, no cracking jokes. It would be fine, though, to know that the idea of “clarity” in art was discussed over a strong coffee, or that the debate on empathy in art took place over a chocolate cake.