Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (February 28, 1923 – June 7, 2014) was a Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, founder and president of The World Phenomenology Institute, and editor (from its inception in the late 1960s) of the book series, Analecta Husserliana.

[citation needed] After the end of World War II she began systematic studies of philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków under the guidance of Roman Ingarden, student of the famous teachers Kazimierz Twardowski and Edmund Husserl.

Her doctoral study, dedicated to explorations of the fundamentals of phenomenology in Nicolai Hartmann and Roman Ingarden's philosophies, was later published as "Essence and Existence" (1957).

[citation needed] In the years 1952–1953 she did postdoctoral researches in the field of social and political sciences at the College d'Europe in Brugge, Belgium.

[citation needed] In 1979 she published, in collaboration with Karol Wojtyła, who had become Pope John Paul II in 1978, an English translation of Wojtyla's book "Osoba i czyn" (Person and Act).

Person and Act, one of Pope John Paul II's foremost literary works, was initially written in Polish; it has been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, English and other languages.

Critics of this work claim that Tymieniecka "changed the Polish translation, confusing its technical language and bending the text to her own philosophical concerns."

[4] Her critics suggest that the English title used by Tymieniecka, "The Acting Person" is indicative of the problems involved with the work, as the author's title was meant to convey the tension between subjective consciousness (person) and objective reality (act), an idea central to the written work and the message the author tried to convey.

[7] In February 2016 the BBC documentary programme Panorama 'revealed' that John Paul II had had a close relationship with Polish-born philosopher Tymieniecka.

The initiative to establish this institute was supported by Roman Ingarden, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, and Hans-Georg Gadamer as well as by the Director of the Husserl-Archives in Leuven, (Belgium) Herman Leo Van Breda.