Edith Stein

Edith Stein was a German philosopher of the phenomenological movement and a Carmelite nun. A student of Edmund Husserl, she wrote her doctoral thesis On the Problem of Empathy and then worked as his assistant at Freiburg. Born into a Jewish family, she became a Catholic in 1922, taught and lectured on the education of women, and entered the Carmelite convent in Cologne in 1933 as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942 and was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 1998.

Key ideas

• Empathy is a distinct kind of experience in which we grasp another person's experience as theirs, not ours.
• Our sense of ourselves is shaped by seeing ourselves through the empathic eyes of others.
• The human person is a unity of body, soul and spirit, which phenomenology can describe without reducing it to psychology.
• Finite being points beyond itself to eternal being, a bridge she built between Husserl and Thomas Aquinas.

Major works

• On the Problem of Empathy (1917)
• Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities (1922)
• Finite and Eternal Being (written 1935–1936)
• The Science of the Cross (written 1941–1942)

In the Book corner

• On the Problem of Empathy 1917 · Advanced
  Edith Stein's doctoral dissertation, written under Edmund Husserl, completed at Freiburg in 1916 and published in 1917. It asks how we experience…

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