Roman Ingarden’s earlier studies on the strata of the work of literary art and his later research into the theory of aesthetic value are one of the most fruitful contributions to twentieth-century aesthetics. His work followed the tradition of philosophical aesthetics on the one hand, and joined the general trends of modern structural approaches to literature and the arts on the other. In contrast to the formalist interests of various structuralists, he had always been concerned with the problems of phenomenological ontology; while he could be distinguished from many contemporary conventional aestheticians as well, keeping closely to the structural analysis of form and meaning in the work of art itself. My impression is that, as a phenomenological aesthetician, his aesthetics seems more important than his phenomenology, while as a structural aesthetician his structural inquiry looks more attractive than his aesthetic ontology and his general value theory.