Roman Ingarden is a Polish phenomenologist and student of Edmund Husserl who developed a differentiated analytic of being. The dissertation draws on his eight concepts of being (acht Seinsbegriffe) in order to determine more precisely the existential status of personhood. Ingarden’s distinctions between various modes of being and forms of existence make it possible to situate personhood ontologically with precision — beyond a purely phenomenological description and within a differentiated framework of the philosophy of being.
Ingarden’s eight concepts of being are organized into four pairs of properties of the form of existence that can be assigned to every entity: ontological autonomy vs. ontological heteronomy, ontological originality vs. ontological derivedness, ontological self-sufficiency vs. ontological non-self-sufficiency, and ontological independence vs. ontological dependence (Bexten 2017, pp. 139–143). In the dissertation, this analytic serves to determine the human person as an ontologically autonomous yet ontologically derived entity — in contrast to absolute being on the one hand and to merely intentional being on the other. Ingarden thus stands alongside Hedwig Conrad-Martius as a representative of a realistic phenomenology that defends ontological realism against Husserl’s transcendental idealism.
Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 139–143 (Ingarden’s eight concepts of being for the ontological determination of personhood).
Further sources:
- Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt (1964/65). Tübingen: Niemeyer (Engl.: Controversy over the Existence of the World, trans. Arthur Szylewicz, 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013/2016) (eight concepts of being for the ontological determination of personhood)
See also
- Edmund Husserl
- Hedwig Conrad-Martius
- Edith Stein
- Adolf Reinach
- Thomas Aquinas
- Aristotle
- Mode of Being
- Form of Existence
- Phenomenology
- Personhood
- Person
- Human Person
- Substance
- Form of Reality
- Concept of Being
- Act and Potency
- Metaphysics
- First Dimension
- Nature
- Substance-Ontological Concept of Person
- Essential Law
- Chapter 2: Method (German)
- Chapter 4: Personhood (German)