Polish Journal of Philosophy

Volume 2, Issue 1, Spring 2008

Truth, Concept Empiricism, and the Realism of Polish Phenomenology

The majority of Polish phenomenologists never found Husserl’s transcendental idealism attractive. In this paper I investigate the source of this rather surprising realist attitude. True enough the founder of Polish phenomenology was Roman Ingarden - one of the most severe critics of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, so it is initially tempting to reduce the whole issue to this sociological fact. However, I argue that there must be something more about Ingarden’s intellectual background that immunized him against Husserl’s transcendental argumentation, and that the same background made his students so sympathetic to his “naive” realism. My claim is that this “something” is Ingarden’s realist concept of truth that he learned (at least partially) from Tarski as opposed to Husserl’s epistemic construal that he took from Brentano.