ABSTRACT
Roman Witold Ingarden was born on February 5, 1893 in Kraków as an Austrian citizen. In 1912, after attending the Gymnasium in the same city, he started to study philosophy at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lvóv. Ingarden’s interest in the problem of the existence of the world is best understood on the background of his intellectual biography. Ingarden was drawn to Edmund Husserl’s approach to philosophy as an alternative to positivism. Ingarden subdivides ontology into three kinds: formal, material and existential ontology. Independently from the distinction between two kinds of idealism, the task for every kind of realism is to demonstrate that the external world (together perhaps with other ideal, i.e. non-temporal entities) is an autonomous being. This is the ambitious task that was undertaken but never fulfilled by Ingarden.
