and lived in the Kraków area. After the Operation Barbarossa 1941 under the German occupation Ingarden secretly taught students mathematics and philosophy. After his house was bombed, he continued work on his book, The Controversy over the Existence of the World. Ingarden became a professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in 1945 shortly after the war but was banned in 1946 under the Communist regime. He then moved to the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where he was offered a position. In 1949, however, he was banned from teaching due to his alleged idealism, supposedly being an "enemy of materialism". In 1957 he was reappointed at the Jagiellonian University after the ban was lifted, and so he went on to teach, write and publish. Ingarden died on June 14, 1970, in Kraków as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage. Works Ingarden was a realist phenomenologist and thus did not accept Husserl's transcendental idealism. His training was phenomenological; nonetheless, his work as a whole was directed towards ontology. That is why Ingarden is one of the most renowned phenomenological ontologists, as he strove to describe the ontological structure and state of being of various objects based on the essential features of any experience that could provide such knowledge. The best-known works of Ingarden, and the only ones widely-known to English-speaking readers, concern aesthetics and literature. His most popular book, for instance, was The Literary Work of Art, which explored the concept of the literary work of art. In this book, Ingarden argued that a literary work of art is a purely intentional object and is a product of the author's conscious acts. This work would contribute to the development of the literary theory called reader-response criticism and influence scholars such as René Wellek and Wolfgang Iser. Another notable notion in Ingarden's aesthetics was his idea that music is not a form of literature. He maintained that literary works have four distinct ontological strata, and one of these - the stratum of represented objectivities - is absent in musical works. In his stratification of literary work of art, he cited that aesthetic value is the polyphonic harmony that arises between these strata of meaning. The exclusive focus on Ingarden's work in aesthetics does not reflect Ingarden's overall philosophical standpoint, which is focused on the ideas regarding formal, existential, and material ontology set forth in his The Controversy over the Existence of the