Abstract
In her doctoral dissertation, completed in 1957, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka sets out in exhaustive and painstaking detail the seminal and long-overlooked work of Roman Ingarden on the relation between essence and existence.2 Ingarden brings these two notions into play in a unique way, turning them upside-down and inside-out, to illuminate anew their significance for ontology and metaphysics. By shaking from these terms the dust of tradition, we are able to see them clearly for the first time, to see how essence and existence are related, and where their differences lie.
There are two ways that the epoche can be used for science: as an internal tool, to make progress within a given field of science; and as an external tool, to evaluate the very notion of what science is, and the role of science among other ways of knowing.1
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Notes
The Role of Husserl’s Epoche for Science: A View from a Physicist,“ Piet Hut, 2001, invited paper presented at the 31g Husserl Circle conference in Bloomington, Indiana, in February 2001.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Essence et Existence: Etude à propos de la philosophie de Roman Ingarden et Nicolaï Hartmann, Paris: Editions Montaigne, 1957.
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, New York: Merriam-Webster, 2001, p. 1944.
Tymieniecka, p. 98.
Ibid.
Thus, unlike the work of Nicola Hartmann, whom Tymieniecka also explores in her dissertation.
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, p. 1721.
The difference is that between a detailed list of all the bones in the body and a skeleton. You may encounter and study a bone as weighing so many grams, occupying so many cubic inches, containing so much carbon, nitrogen, etc., even as being of such and such an age. To that knowledge may be added the fact that things of this type supply a necessary structure to vertebrate life-forms such as bipeds. Ontological knowledge may extend to the possibility that DNA from this bone may be used to clone another concrete being.
Tymieniecka, p. 97.
See Ibid., pp. 105–06.
See Ibid., p. 106.
Ibid., p. 108.
This is what Tymieniecka calls the coincidence of “the fullness of determination” and “the universal delimitation”.
Tymieniecka, pp. 154 ff.
Tymieniecka here anticipates, as she so often does, the use of the term propre which Derrida thought he invented!
Tymieniecka, p. 120.
See Ibid., pp. 111–18.
See Ibid., pp. 123–24.
See Ibid., pp. 126–29.
Ibid., p. 137.
Ibid., p. 144.
Ibid., p. 145.
Ibid., p. 149.
Ibid., p. 199.
To be sure, logic and necessity limit the human capacity for autonomy (to which we have, admittedly, not done justice in this essay), but human being is are, nonetheless, free to some extent in Ingarden’s model.
Tymieniecka, p. 214.
Ibid., p. 217.
Ibid., p. 199.
Ibid., p. 202.
Ibid., p. 201.
Ibid., p. 216.
Except in the case of a possible being with radical essence, as Tymieniecka explains. There are five types of essence in Ingarden’s theory: radical, strict, moderately strict, purely material, and simple. In a being with radical essence, the essence of a being and its mode of existence would be identical — if such a being existed, it would be pure essence. But Ingarden denies the possibility that such a being could exist, as it would be pure ideality, without any foothold in concrete reality (in matter, and consequently in form).
A being with radical essence would be fully determined already, and thus not open to further interaction with another.
Tymieniecka, p. 241.
Lecture delivered by Edmund Husserl, Vienna, 10 May 1935. From Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, Quentin Lauer (ed. and trans. ), New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965, p. 21.
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Mardas, N. (2003). Essence and Existence in Roman Ingarden’s Phenomenology. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Passions of the Soul in the Metamorphosis of Becoming. Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology in Dialogue, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0229-4_17
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