The article argues that, paradoxically, Roman Ingarden is unable to demonstrate that the world „exists” in any essential sense of the word „existence”, since he assumes (in line with Edmund Husserl) an ego-centered, living-through model of pure consciousness, and thus, again following Husserl, he postulates as the starting point of his considerations the existence of two separate realms of individual objects: the realm of pure consciousness (understood in a Husserlian manner as a stream of experiences) and the realm of objective world. Consciousness is grasped as a set of acts, not contents. However, consciousness (as pointed out in neo-Kantianism by Paul Natorp and in phenomenology by Jean-Paul Sartre) is something primary, in which only later on the world and the real existing subject can be constituted as such; hence consciousness cannot be equated with any subject whatsoever. Consciousness does not constitute anything but is a position from which we can see the constitution itself. Thus conceptualized consciousness does not contain the lived experience of the world but stands closely to the being itself. The fact that we have the living-through experience of the world is only secondarily conjectured by the subject already constituted in the primary consciousness. The failure of Ingarden’s project is caused by his Cartesian assumption regarding the primacy of the empirical conscious subject (a view shared with Husserl), his co-opting of the British- -empiricist model of epistemology, namely the distinction between the ‘sense data’ and ‘intentional grasping of the sensuous data’, in conjunction with something what Hermann Schmitz has called ‘metaphysics of the solid object’. In the aftermath of these considerations those aspects in Ingarden’s philosophy which truly lead toward realism are revealed.

In this paper Roman Ingarden’s theory of meaning is presented. It turns out to be an interesting mixture of mentalist and anti-mentalist intuitions. Mentalists, like e.g. Edmund Husserl, claim that linguistic meaning has its source in the fact that our words express our mental states, while anti‑mentalists try to situate meanings outside our minds.

The subject of the article is the assessment of the way of presentation of the issue of realism and idealism in the Controversy over the Existence of the World by R. Ingarden. First, the author of this paper offers his own systematization of the issue of ‘realism – idealism’, then he goes on to show Ingarden’s position. The modern opposition ‘realism – idealism’ can be divided into three main areas: (1) the problem of the existence of the so‑called ‘constitutive a priori’, (2) the problem of the argumentative transgression of the immanence of consciousness (the so‑called ‘bridge problem’), (3) the problem of the causal genesis of the image of the world at the disposal of human cognitive subjects (skeptical hypotheses). The author undertakes to show that the Controversy over the Existence of the World takes as a starting point only a specific interpretation of the issue of realism and idealism: the interpretation contained in the writings of E. Husserl, while omitting the fundamental issue of the nature of time and space, and is limited thereby to the interpretation of realism and idealism from the point of view of the question of the existence qualified as constitutive a priori.

According to Nicolai Hartmann, the correlativistic prejudice is the claim that a being must be a correlate of a subject, and this, he argues, is the main prejudice of Husserl’s phenomenology taken as an eidetic science of transcendental consciousness with its correlates. In contrast to Hartmann, the author of this article claims that Husserl’s conception of the noetic-noematic correlation does not lead to the correlativistic prejudice. Husserl distinguishes between two concepts of object: the noematic ‛object simpliciter’ (the pure X) and the ‛object in the How of its determinations’ (a noematic sense), and he demonstrates that the noematic ‛object simpliciter’ transcends the limit of actual noetic-noematic correlation, it is a correlate of the Idea in the Kantian sense of the term and this idea cannot be intrinsically given in its content. In the article the author shows that Husserl’s concept of the noematic ‘object simpliciter’ as a pure X is similar to Kant’s concept of transcendental object as ‛something in general = X’. In analogy to a transcendental object, noematic ‛object simpliciter’ is partially knowable and it appears to be an irrational fact in its unknowable rest. As a consequence, the ‛object simpliciter’ is something more than a correlate of consciousness and retains always its extra-noematic content. Therefore, the world is only partially correlative to the possibility of experience.

The article is an attempt to define reduction – a phenomenological methodological device – as the beginning of philosophy. The author considers such questions as: What motivates a phenomenologist to do reduction? Can one speak of philosophy before reduction? What is the essence of reduction? To answer these questions the author refers to Edmund Husserl and Jan Patočka, and tries to show that reduction is to be understood as an unmotivated expression of philosopher’s determination to overcome evidence inherent to natural attitude. The author argues that reduction enables one to perform a conceptualization of the world as such. Finally, reduction is defined as an attempt to take thinking seriously.