Roman Ingarden: Phenomenology, Responsibility and the Ontological Foundations of Morality

Abstract

Even if Roman Ingarden did not develop an ethics stricto sensu, and although his philosophy cannot be immediately associated with a “practical turn” in phenomenology, his investigation of the essence of the real world brought him to consider the nature of man and the ontological conditions of possibility of his morally oriented actions. Without expressing normative prescriptions, and maintaining his observations in the field of eidetic description, the author felt the need to provide a foundation for ethics, inasmuch as he strived to both highlight ethical phenomenon evidence in material ontology contexts, as well as demonstrate the structural presuppositions of this phenomenon within the context of formal ontology. It is exactly this priority of ontological investigation that represents one of the most original contributions of the Polish philosopher on practical topics. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the way in which such a particular phenomenologicalontological metaethics takes shape through the theses expressed in Ingarden’s articles on human nature and responsibility.