Edith Stein's Phenomenology of Woman's Personality and Value

Edith Stein: Women, Social-Political Philosophy, Theology, Metaphysics and Public History, 2016

Edith Stein’s interest in Scholastic philosophy following her baptism opened a new philosophical horizon for her thinking. By reading Stein’s later philosophy as a rupture with her earlier phenomenological work one runs the risk of not seeing both the continuity of her philosophical trajectory as well as certain developments that were already unfolding in her early phenomenological writings. In this essay, I show how Stein’s discussion of personal individuation and its formal/numeric and material/qualitative aspects, which are developed in her first text on empathy, continues through to her final philosophical work, Finite and Eternal Being, albeit with different terminology. The aforementioned distinction can also be found in Stein’s Introduction to Philosophy where she discusses a qualitative, unsayable, indissoluble and incomparable moment that belongs to all human persons. This moment unifies and colors the character of persons. From the perspective of Stein’s biography, her development of personal individuation can be viewed as having been influenced by certain personal religious lived experiences.

Puncta, 2021

One defining claim that critical phenomenologists make of the critical phenomenological method is that description no longer simply plays the role of detailing the world around the describing phenomenologist, but rather has the potential to transform worlds and persons. The transformative potential of the critical phenomenological enterprise is motivated by aspirations of social and political transformation. Critical phenomenology accordingly takes, as its starting point, descriptions of the oppressive historical social structures and contexts that have shaped our experience and shows how these produce inequitable ways of being in the world (Guenther 2020, 12). For example, critical phenomenologists have provided rich descriptions of marginalized lived experience, particularly racialized experience (Ngo, 2017; Yancy, 2017), dis-abled experience and experiences of illness (Lajoie and Douglas, 2020; Toombs, 1993), gendered experience (Beauvoir, 2009; Salamon, 2010), and so forth. What...

Maynooth Philosophical Papers, 2008

In recent years a great deal of secondary literature has been published in relation to the works of Edith Stein. The literature spans a number of languages and covers many disciplines of study. 1 What is undertaken here is to make available a bibliography of secondary literature in English-this bibliography focuses on publications that emphasise the philosophical nature of Stein"s writings in particular. Sarah Borden and Kevin Jones have compiled a more complete and thorough account of the extant secondary literature (spanning a variety of languages) on the writings of Stein which is available online. 2 What we find below is taken in principle from Borden and Jones" compilation. However, there have been a number of additions made to the bibliography; (i) in terms of articles and books which have just recently been published, such as Mette Lebech"s On the Problem of Dignity (2009) and (ii) those that are forthcoming, such as Sarah Borden"s, Thine Own Self: Individuality in Edith Stein's Later Writings (late 2009) etc. Further additions have been made to take account of the following important philosophical commentaries on the works of Stein:

Edith Steins intellektueller Weg. Phänomenologie, Christliche Philosophie und karmelitische Spiritualität , 2020

Chapter in: Aschendorff Verlag 2020, Edith Steins intellektueller Weg. Phänomenologie, Christliche Philosophie und karmelitische Spiritualität, Hrsg. von Harm Klueting und Edeltraud Klueting.

Philobiblon vol. XX., 2015

The problem of individuality lies at the basis of phenomenological investigations both in Edith Stein's earliest and mature works. Her doctoral thesis, the On the Problem of Empathy, focuses on the phenomenological acts of perceiving persons in an intersubjective situation. She aims at a conception of the person beyond a construction based on the pure "I" or the stream of consciousness. According to her, the psycho-physical subject can comprehend the foreign living body as an individual. Dilthey is not interested in the individual in a phenomenological sense, but rather in the question as to what constitutes value in the society. Although all of Stein's references to Dilthey's views in her doctoral thesis are of critical nature, there is still a connection between the two thinkers. In this paper, I would like to investigate the relationship between Edith Stein's critique of Dilthey's understanding of the individual with a particular focus on Stein's conception of empathic act as the founding act for the community. * Edith Stein's beginnings in philosophy used to be characterized as being influenced by Husserlian phenomenology. Furthermore, it is also remarkable that her philosophical intention was influenced by other philosophical impulses. On the other hand it is to be noted that, from the start, she aimed at a phenomenological method of her own, even if her philosophical theses, especially in her early years, betray a clear Husserlian effect. In the following essay, I will investigate the specific phenomenological method of Edith Stein, starting from her first methodological question on the problem of empathy, which leads to her later work on the phenomenological aspects of the social experiences. While reflecting on the contemporary impulses of the early texts On the Problem of Empathy and the Individual and Community, the following text will examine how the phenomenological method becomes a method for the ontology of sociality. It is also noteworthy that Edith Stein's interest in Dilthey was guided by the problem of the community, and what she found in Dilthey's descriptive psychology was an alternative for her first investigations on empathy. In my opinion, it is not only in her first philosophical work that Edith Stein pays attention to empathy as a phenomenological act, but she also considers it the basic act of experience in her

Modernism/Modernity, 2020

The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2018

The central hypothesis of this paper is that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers significant philosophical groundwork for an ethics that honours key feminist commitments – embodiment, situatedness, diversity and the intrinsic sociality of subjectivity. Part 1 evaluates feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. Part 2 defends the claim that Merleau-Ponty's non-dualist ontology underwrites leading approaches in feminist ethics, notably Care Ethics and the Ethics of Vulnerability. Part 3 examines Merleau-Ponty's analyses of embodied percipience, arguing that these offer a powerful critique of the view from nowhere, a totalizing God's-eye-view with pretensions to objectivity. By revealing the normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the intersubjective domain, he establishes the view from