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In a footnote added to the second edition of Controversy about the Existence of the World Roman Ingarden wrote, “… the problem of the human person attracted me already in my early youth, as early as 1913. I then read various authors (Dilthey, Simmel and others), as I wanted to make this the subject of my doctor’s thesis. But in the autumn of 1913 owing to entirely secondary circumstances I finally decided, after consultations with Husserl, that my thesis would be on Bergson’s treatment of intuition. Ever since, however, the problem of the human person has never been entirely out of my sight.”1 Indeed, the problem of man has appeared in many of Roman Ingarden’s works: in the already mentioned thesis ‘Intuition und Intellekt bei Henri Bergson’, in the beautiful essay ‘Man and Time’, in Controversy about the Existence of the World, and finally in About Responsibility, the last work published before his death.2 It would, however, be difficult to find there a complete theory of the human person, but he did lay down the foundations for such a theory, he formulated what in fact were its essential elements, and also showed the way in which it should be constructed.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-1446-5_7

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