Abstract
This paper provides an overview of development of Ingarden's ontology of intentional objects between 1918 and 1948. The aim of this overview is to prove the claim that Ingarden's ontology of intentional objects came out of the epistemological problem of absolute theory of knowledge, formulated in his dissertation, and gradually transformed into an important tool in his discussion of metaphysical questions of the idealism-realism problem in the Controversy over the Existence of the World.
This transformation has three phases. The first phase started in 1918 with Ingarden's return to Poland and his rejection of both Husserl's transcendental idealism and the prevailing trends in contemporary Polish philosophy.
This led him to develop his own account of phenomenology and to move from the problem of absolute theory of knowledge to the problem of its ontological foundations. The period ends with his Habilitationsschrift called On Essential Questions finished in 1923.
Ingarden's critique of epistemological conventionalism in this text contains his first considerations about the ontology of intentional objects. The second phase from 1924 to 1931 is the period of formation of the idealism-realism problem and the genesis of Ingarden's book The Literary Work of Art (LWA) which was meant to be a preparation for discussion of this problem.
The book introduces the concept of purely intentional objects and provides extensive analyses of their ontological structure and their functions in epistemology and aesthetics. In the third phase which ends with the publication of the second volume of the Controversy, Ingarden develops the concept of intentional object mainly in his aesthetics.
However, in the Controversy the concept of intentional objects becomes substantial for the exact formulation of the idealism-realism problem and in the discussions about the related metaphysical questions.