B. Dziemidok - Böcker

Roman Ingarden's very extensive philosophical work in metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics con­ tinues to attract increasing attention both in Poland and in North America. Further work left uncompleted at his death is appearing. Major bibliographies of his work as well as of studies about his work are now in print. Ingar­ den's scattered articles on various questions in philosophy are being collected. And conferences devoted to his work are now held regularly. These diverse activities might suggest a similar diver­ sity in Ingarden's philosophical legacy. But such a sugges­ tion would be misleading. For interest in Ingarden's work has continued to centre on the one area which is arguably at the core of his achievement, namely the complex prob­ lems of aesthetics. In this field Ingarden seemed to pull together his various interests in ontology and epistemology especially. Here he brought those interests to focus on a set of issues that would occupy him creatively throughout the vicissitudes of his long and difficult scholarly life. More­ over, aesthetics is also the field where Ingarden perhaps most succeeded in orchestrating the many themes he owed to his phenomenological training while finally transposing the central issues into something original, something dis­ tinctively his own that philosophers can no longer identify as merely phenomenological. Ingarden's aesthetics not surprisingly has captured the interest today of many scholars in different fields.

This text aims to provide an extensive and detailed philosophic analysis of the phenomenon of the comic. The author examines existing theories of the comic, from Aristotle to date, and classifies them, as well as advancing his own definition of the comic as a broadly understood deviation from the norm, which takes into account not only the deviation from an objectively existing norm, but the subjective sense of the normal as well. The author also provides a taxonomy of previous analyses of this subject, and discusses the major techniques of evoking the comic. The final part of the book deals with the social aspects of the comic and discusses the social role of humour mockery, satire and irony. He elaborates on the educational, integrating, punitive, and therapeutic aspects of various forms of comic activities. This text is based on material drawn from a range of sources. The author does not limit the scope of his analysis to the philosophical and the aesthetic aspects of the comic, but takes into account its extra-aesthetic occurences and applications as presented by psychologists, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, theoreticians and historians of literature, film and music.This study should be of interest to students of literary criticism, theatre and film studies, educational theory, psychology and theory of augmentation, as well as to aestheticians and philosophers of art.

The problem of the comical is one of the most interesting issues in aesthetics. Its significance extends well beyond the sphere of aesthetic studies and has at­ tracted the attention of the scholars working in other fields such as the theorists and historians of particular art forms, sociologists, psychologists, as well as anthropologists, ethnographers and the theorists of education. Philosophy has devoted a lot of attention to the comical. Since Aristotle al­ most every philosopher has felt obliged to comment on this question. However, even though they have offered a number of accurate observations on the subject, the philosophers involved in the discussion about the comical have earned a reputation of being rather devoid of the sense of the comical and many a time their considerations have been compared to those of a blind man talking about colours. And yet the problem of the comical kept attracting them to such an ex­ tent that they paid no heed to the difficulties involved and neglected the risk of becoming ridiculous themselves. Adolf Zeissing once remarked that all the litera­ ture on the comical is a "comedy of errors" committed while defining the comi­ cal. Yet even he could not resist the temptation of adding another page to this "comedy of errors". Tadeusz Boy-Zeleriski claimed that the good thing about the philosophical writing concerning the comical is that it offers not only the theory of the comical but at the same time is the theory's practical application.