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Mintys: RomanIngardenAndOurTimes

Stanford Encyclopedia: Roman Ingarden

The modes of being are defined in terms of different characteristic combinations of ‘existential moments’. The existential moments mostly concern either an object's temporal determinations (or lack thereof), or the different dependencies it bears (or does not bear) to other sorts of object. Indeed in drawing out his existential moments, Ingarden goes beyond Husserl's influential work on dependence to distinguish four different existential moments of dependence (and their contrasting moments of independence):

• Contingency (the dependence of a separate entity on another in order to remain in existence);
• Derivation (the dependence of an entity on another in order to come into existence);
• Inseparateness (the dependence of an entity that can only exist if it coexists with something else in a single whole); and
• Heteronomy (the dependence of an entity for its existence and entire qualitative endowment on another).

In so doing, Ingarden develops one of the richest and most detailed analyses of dependence ever offered, providing distinctions in the notion of dependence that can clarify many philosophical problems including but certainly not limited to the realism/idealism problem.

Ingarden's four highest existential-ontological categories or ‘modes of being’ are: Absolute, Real, Ideal, and Purely Intentional.

• The absolute mode of being could be exhibited only by a being such as God, which could exist even if nothing else whatsoever ever existed.
• The ideal mode of being is a timeless mode of existence suitable for platonistically conceived numbers;
• the real mode of being is that of contingent spatio-temporal entities such as the realist assumes ordinary rocks and trees to be;
• while the purely intentional mode of being is that occupied by fictional characters and other entities which owe their existence and nature to acts of consciousness.

Thus the realism/idealism controversy can be reconfigured as the controversy over whether the so-called ‘real world’ has the real or purely intentional mode of being.