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.

The aim of this article is to discuss the issue of a “postulated God” and the problem of “inversion of knowledge” about God. In the article I turn my attention to consequences of such an inversion. I refer to the views of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Lev Shestov and other selected thinkers, primarily in the field of existential philosophy. The starting point for these considerations is the issue of sources of knowledge about God and the subjective conditions of this knowledge.

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.