  Ingarden accepted that, as long as we approach the realism problem from the standpoint of epistemology, or from within the standpoint of transcendental phenomenology, there is no way out to establish the existence and knowledge of a mind-independent world. Nor, however, can one establish that the real world depends on consciousness, since any attempted talk about the world in-itself and its nature would be meaningless — thus from that standpoint, the controversy over the existence of the world would have to remain undecided. But he also thought that other approaches to philosophy were legitimate, and indeed that one should begin from ontology rather than epistemology.