Edith Stein’s Encounter with Edmund Husserl and Her Phenomenology of the Person

Abstract

Stein’s early engagement with Husserl in Göttingen and Freiburg, first as his doctoral student and then as his research assistant, was decisive for her philosophical development. Husserl’s phenomenology shaped her philosophical thinking. Despite embracing, in the twenties, a Christian metaphysics inspired by Thomas Aquinas, she continued to engage with phenonenology through the nineteen thirties, even writing a short review of Husserl’s Crisis when it appeared in Philosophia in 1937. In this paper I outline Edith Stein’s personal engagement with Edmund Husserl and his phenomenology, and outline her phenomenology of empathy and embodiment, including her conception of individual personhood.