Ingarden, Roman (Witold)

Ingarden, Roman (Witold), Polish music theorist and aesthetician; b. Krakόw, Feb. 5, 1893; d. there, June 14, 1970. He studied philosophy with Husserl and mathematics with Hilbert at the univs. of Göttingen and Freiburg im Breisgau (Ph.D.,1918). After completing his Habilitation (1921), he joined the faculty at the Univ.of Lwów. In 1945 he became chairman of the philosophy dept. at the JagellonianUniv. in Krakόw, only to be barred from teaching in 1950 by the Communist government because of his adherence to “idealism”; during his forced sabbatical, he translated Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. He regained his academic post in 1956, retiring in 1963. Ingarden is regarded as the ablest of Husserl’s students, preserving the cognitive core of Husserl’s phenomenology that was lost in Heidegger’s and Sartre’s emotional reduction of it to existentialism. His The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity (Berkeley, 1986), an excerpt from his Studia estetyki (Studies in Aesthetics; Warsaw, 1957-70), is an important consideration of ontology and epistemology in musical aesthetics. His other publications include Spór o istnienie świata (Controversy over the Existence of the World; Krakόw, 1947-48), Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst: Musikwerk, Bild, Architektur, Film (Tübingen, 1962), The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature, with an Appendix on the Functions of Language in the Theater (Evanston, III, 1973), and Selected Papers in Aesthetics (Washington, D.C., 1985).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire