Roman Ingarden's very extensive philosophical work in metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics con tinues to attract increasing attention both in Poland and in North America. Further work left uncompleted at his death is appearing. Major bibliographies of his work as well as of studies about his work are now in print. Ingar den's scattered articles on various questions in philosophy are being collected. And conferences devoted to his work are now held regularly. These diverse activities might suggest a similar diver sity in Ingarden's philosophical legacy. But such a sugges tion would be misleading. For interest in Ingarden's work has continued to centre on the one area which is arguably at the core of his achievement, namely the complex prob lems of aesthetics. In this field Ingarden seemed to pull together his various interests in ontology and epistemology especially. Here he brought those interests to focus on a set of issues that would occupy him creatively throughout the vicissitudes of his long and difficult scholarly life. More over, aesthetics is also the field where Ingarden perhaps most succeeded in orchestrating the many themes he owed to his phenomenological training while finally transposing the central issues into something original, something dis tinctively his own that philosophers can no longer identify as merely phenomenological. Ingarden's aesthetics not surprisingly has captured the interest today of many scholars in different fields.

This is the complete and critical translation into English of Controversy over the Existence of the World by the Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden (1893-1970), student and critic of Husserl. Volume I of his three-volume opus magnum offers a fundamental ontological analysis of the modes of being of various types of objects.

A leading Polish philosopher of the 20th century, Roman Ingarden is principally renowned in Western culture for his work in aesthetics and the theory of literature. Jeff Mitscherling demonstrates, in this extensive work, how Ingarden's thought constitutes a major contribution to the more fundamental fields of ontology and metaphysics. Unparalleled in existing literature, Mitscherling's comprehensive survey of Ingarden's philosophy will give the reader an informed introduction to this major work of phenomenological analysis.

Illuminating the tensions between theory, history, and interpretation in contemporary aesthetics, Peter McCormick traces here the intellectual history of our understanding of the relationship between philosophy and the arts.

Historically, phenomenology began in Edmund Husserl’s theory of mathematics and logic, went on to focus for him on transcendental rst philosophy and for others on metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, and theory of interpretation. The c- tinuing focus has thus been on knowledge and being. But if one began without those interests and with an understanding of the phenomenological style of approach, one might well see that art and aesthetics make up the most natural eld to be approached phenomenologically. Contributions to this eld have continually been made in the phenomenological tradition from very early on, but, so to speak, along the side. (The situation has been similar with phenomenological ethics. ) A great deal of thought about art and aesthetics has nevertheless accumulated during a century and a handbook like the present one is long overdue. The project of this handbook began in conversations over dinner in Sepp’s apa- ment in Baden-Baden at one evening of the hot European summer in the year 2003. As things worked out, he knew more about whom to ask and how much space to allocate to each entry and Embree knew more about how to conduct the inviting, preliminary editing, and prodding of contributors who were late returning their criticized drafts and copyedited entries and was able to invest the time and other resources from his endowed chair. That process took longer than anticipated and there were additional unfortunate delays due to factors beyond the editors’s control.

This book proposes that aesthetics begin not with concepts of being or semblance, but with a concept of appearing. Seel examines the existential and cultural meaning of aesthetic experience. In doing so, he brings aesthetics and philosophy of art together again, which in continental as well as analytical thinking have been more and more separated in the recent decades.

This Ingardenia volume is the second in the Analecta Husserliana series that is entirely devoted to the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden. The first was volume IV (1976). Twenty years after Ingarden's death, this volume demonstrates that the Polish phenomenologist's contribution to philosophy and literary scholarship has received world-wide attention. His ideas have proven especially fruitful for the definition of the structure of the literary work of art and the subsequent recognition of its characteristic features. Of all the early phenomenologists who were students of Husserl, it is Ingarden whose work has faithfully pursued the original tenet that language "holds" the essence of the life-world "in readiness" (bereit halten). To investigate this premise with the rigor of a science, as Husserl had envisioned for phenomenology, was Ingarden's life work. That Ingarden did not quite reach his ambitious goal does not diminish his unquestionable achievement. The understanding of the nature of the literary work of art has increased enormously because of his analyses and aesthetics. The Polish phenomenologist investigated above all the work of art as a structure of necessary components which define and determine its nature. That the artistic ingredient was shortchanged under those conditions should not be surprising, particu larly since Ingarden usually kept a purist's philosophical distance from the concrete detail of the material under consideration. He was not concerned with individual works of art but with the principle that was shared by all of them as the defining feature of their being.

Ingarden's relevance today -- Introduction to the concept of identity -- Some traditional approaches -- Ingarden's general ontology -- Nature and identity of a literary work in American aesthetics -- Nelson Goodman's syntactical identity -- Richard Wolheim's amendment -- Psychologism -- Semantic accounts -- Joseph Margolis's culturally emergent objects -- Phenomenological concept of identity -- Identity of a perceptual object -- The concept of intentionality -- The Concept of constitution -- Ideality and identity of the objectivities of understanding -- Husserl's theory of meaning -- Ingarden's objections to Husserl's transcendental idealism -- Hermeneutic challenges against the possibility of transcendental phenomenology -- Literary work as a schematic structure -- The notion of a 'purely intentional object' -- Schematism -- Structure of a literary work of art -- The stratum of linguistic sound formations -- The stratum of meanings -- Meanings of sentences -- The stratum of presented objects -- The stratum of schematized aspects.