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Alasdair MacIntyre
EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922 Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2007. paperback: 208 pages ISBN-10: 074255953X reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 02/16/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? Yes. review: There are 17 chapters and an Index in Notre Dame University Professor Alasdair MacIntyre's 2006 intellectual biography, EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922. Eight chapters concentrate on intensely,
largely technically academic philosophy. If you are already familiar
the thinking of Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804), you will find some of
these eight chapters covering familar ground. Six other mixed
"philosophical" chapters may be new to most readers: especially, about
the "phenomenological" approach to philosophy pioneered by Edmund
Husserl (1859 - 1938). That was a fresh approach within German
philosophy, critical of both Kant and the post-Kantian Idealism of
Hegel and others. McIntyre's presentation of academic phenomenology is
accurate and lucid.
Only three chapters, in my judgment, are immediately intelligible to a person not already reasonably well read in modern philosophy: (1) Why Take an Interest in Edith Stein as a Philosopher?; (10) 1916- 1922: The Complexity of Stein's History and (16) Stein's Conversion. Who was Edith Stein (1891 - 1942) and "Why Take an Interest in Edith Stein as a Philosopher?" She was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Silesia (then politically Prussian now Polish). Only her mother was devout among the entire Stein family, including eleven children, seven of whom survived beyond childhood). Edith was the youngest. Although Breslau, where Edith grew up (her father died when she was only two), had an important Jewish institution of higher learning, Edith's combined Stein-Courant families did not move in intellectual Jewish circles. Mildly rebellious, Edith stopped believing in her inherited religion as a young teenager. She did however for the rest of her mother's life accompany her to synagogue and pray alongside her. In 1922, after reading a life of Saint Teresa of Avila (whose grandfather was a converted Spanish Jew), Edith Stein was baptized Roman Catholic. Eleven years later, at age 42) she became a Carmelite nun. In August 1942, Stein and her older sister Rosa were taken by the Gestapo from their convent in the Netherlands and executed by gassing at Auschwitz one week later. In 1998 Edith Stein, whose name as a nun was Sister Teresa (or Teresia) Benedicta of the Cross, was declared a martyr and saint of the Roman Catholic Church by Pope John Paul II. He also proclaimed her one of the six principal Roman Catholic patron saints of all Europe. That personal life is why non-specialists in philosophy read about Edith's life in philosophy. For at the University of Breslau, after two years finding psychology unconvincing, she turned to philosophy. She then went to the University of Goettingen and studied the new "phenomenology" of Professor Edmund Husserl. She moved with him to the University of Freiburg, became his graduate assistant, and took her PhD summa cum laude in 1916 with a pioneering phenomenological dissertation on "Empathy." That dissertation along with all her major works in philosophy and her 500-page autobiography, LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916, are now readily available in English. By the accounts of biographer MacIntyre and others, Edith Stein was a very gifted and in some ways original philosopher, especially when improving and applying Husserl's phenomenological method to problems of human interactions, friendships, family relationships and politics. During her eleven years as a Catholic laywoman before becoming a nun, Edith Stein had lectured extensively on women's equality with men and women's New Testament-attested (through Paul's praise of celibacy) right to lead fully professional lives in universities, the law, medicine and elsewhere -- rarities in her days in Germany. She also translated some of Cardinal John Henry Newman's letters into German and published them. She studied the medieval Catholic theologian-philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas and translated his essay "On Truth" from Latin into German. By all accounts, Edith Stein was a loving Jewish daughter, sister and aunt. She nursed infectious diseases during World War I. She loved dancing and hiking. She had many friends at university, smoked but did not drink. She had even picked out her future mate (unnamed) among her university friends. She was very, very secular. She was also a philosopher in the life-changing mold of Socrates, Plato and Saint Augustine. Like them, her "love of wisdom" led her beyond sheer abstract thinking about tough problems. A surprising number of Husserl's students either became better Jews or Christians for their philosophizing. Or, like Edith, they became converted from Judaism and were then baptized Lutherans or Catholics. Yet, Edith concluded, for all its powers of observation of the thinking human being, phenomenology did not lead beyond itself to God. Something more was needed: in her case, the life of Saint Teresa of Avila, Bible reading and the example of her friends. Her focus in religion was on Christ crucified. Later she developed a theology of combined Jewish-Christian atonement for the monstrous evils of such once baptized Christians as Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler. My recommendation: read at least the three chapters I have flagged of EDITH STEIN: PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922. They will give you a sense of how philophizing (even if the academic details are initially too technical for you) can in some cases radically transform a person's life and lead her to a "rebirth" as a profoundly religious person. If you already have some Plato or Hume or Kant under your belt, the entire intellectual biography of Saint Edith Stein will be an "open book" that you will read more than once. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/285070087.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 02/2010 name of review: Edith Stein: first a philosopher, then gassed at Auschwitz, then a Saint rating: * * * * * review: How many creative philosophers have been canonized Catholic saints lately? The only one that springs to my mind is Edith Stein (1891 - 1942). She had been a Carmelite nun for nearly ten years, named Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, when she and her older Jewish-Catholic sister and fellow Carmelite nun Rosa were gassed to death by Nazis in Auschwitz, Poland in 1942. In 1998 Pope John Paul II canonized Stein -- as a Christian martyr -- and declared her one of six patron saints of all Europe. If you are not a professional philosopher, you probably turn to her writings and to books about Edith Stein because you want to learn more about how a saint thinks and acts. Many Jews, however, were outraged in 1998 when the pope, himself a professor of philosophy, said that Stein died witnessing her Christian faith. Some Jews said, no: she was killed solely because she was Jewish. Edith Stein herself, I think, would have said she was killed witnessing to both her new and her old religions. She consciously offered her life to atone for the sins against her beloved Jewish people by such once baptized Christians as Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels. If you are a philosopher, a student especially of 20th Century existentialism, phenomenology and of the writings of Nazi activist and onetime fellow philosophy student of Stein -- Martin Heidegger -- you will, I predict, thoroughly enjoy Notre Dame philosophy professor's 2006 EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 -1922. On January 1, 1922 Edith was baptized a Roman Catholic. She had given up praying to her Jewish God at age 14, as a precocious, not very religious teenager in Breslau, Silesia (then a Prussian, now a Polish city). She had never personally experienced the intellectually advanced, profound forms of Judaism found in a number of German cities. For the most part following Edith Stein's own 500-page autobiography, LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916, Professor MacIntyre retells the Saint's life as she finished drafting it in 1933, just after Hitler's Nazis had come to power in Germany. MacIntyre likens the impact of "philosophizing" on Edith Stein's personal life to the the impact the same activity had on Socrates, Plato and Saint Augustine. The relentless search for truth changed those four lives profoundly. As the same pursuit distinctly did not change the psyche of one-time ardent Nazi philosophy professor Martin Heidegger! Stein took her PhD summa cum laude in 1916 at the German university of Freiburg. Her dissertation subject was "human empathy." And she used the precise, painstaking "phenomenological" methods of her beloved profesor Edmund Husserl to probe the many ways one person reads the inner workings of another's soul on the basis of facial expressions, gestures, friendship and otherwise. From empathy Stein went on in later years to women's equality with men, their right to lives in learned professions and politics. I have suggested to my Feldenkrais exercises instructor and author Lavinia Plonka (WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?, WALKING YOUR TALK) that the phenomenology created by Edmund Husserl and practiced by Edith Stein and other philosophers is the perfect framework for the "controlled consciousness" that we find in Feldenkrais (teaching your brain to notice minute differences in bodily movement) and to a lesser extent in yoga, pilates, qigong, tai chi, religious examination of conscience and other forms of personal introspection of consciousness. The more exposure you have already had to academic philosophy in university or in books, the easier a time you will have with EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 -1922. But I must not mislead you. This book is, at most, 40% non-philosophical placing of Edith Stein in her time and country. The rest is about that form of hard thinking called philosophy. Even I, who 50 years ago but not since until recently had immersed myself in philosophy, have had to read and re-read a dozen or more tough passages on what was original in the phenomenology of Husserl and Stein and what was partially rejected by Husserl's student Martin Heidegger. Edith Stein, says Alasdair MacIntyre raised more important philosophical questions than she definitively answered. But that is a not uncommon failing of philosophers, he argued, including of the great Immanuel Kant. The ex-Nazi Martin Heidegger, not Edith Stein, is conceded to be Germany's most important 20th Century philosopher. But Stein is important in her own right as a creative, original philosopher. I will let you know once Heidegger is proclaimed a saint! -OOO- http://www.lunch.com/reviews/d/UserReview-Alasdair_MacIntyre_EDITH_STEIN_ A_PHILOSOPHICAL_PROLOGUE_1913_1922-1696285-201644-Edith_Stein _first_a_philosopher_then_gassed_at.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 02/18/2011 title of review: Edith Stein: Philosopher of Interpersonal Relations: "Empathy" rating: * * * * * review: People study Edith Stein aka Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce (1891 - 1942) for widely different reasons. Her fellow Carmelite Order nuns and priests tend to emphasize her insights into Christian and Jewish spirituality and her death at Auschwitz as a martyr to Nazi anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. Thus the generally excellent EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY by Carmelite nun Waltraud Herbstrith displays the biographer's lack of depth as a professional philosopher. Stein's 1998 canonization by Pope John Paul II as Saint and one of six Patrons of Europe made Edith Stein better known among Jews: many angry that she had been portrayed as a Christian rather than a Jewish martyr. Stein, herself, be it said, rejoiced in being both Christian and Jew. Yet in her youth, Edith Stein's passion was the profession of demanding, academic philosophy. Now steps into a previous biographical vacuum Notre Dame University philosophy professor Alasdair MacIntyre and his 2006 EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922. Who will likely read this study of the earliest years of Edith Stein in the practice of philosophy? My guess is that Catholics will reach for the book because they want to know all they can about their fellow Catholic thinker and martyr. Unless, however, they have studied or read philosophy, especially modern German philosophy, they will find A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE very tough fishing in unfamiliar waters. Author MacIntyre, I think, does work hard to make his heroine accessible to the non-philosopher, so much so that professional philosophers may find perhaps 40% of his biography irrelevant. On the other hand, MacIntyre concedes, Edith Stein was not a philosopher of the first rank. She was original. She wrote lucidly. She raised more philosophical questions than she answered and they were good questions. But her total influence on European philosophy was far less than her onetime colleague and self-serving Nazi Martin Heidegger (BEING AND TIME, 1927). Professors and students of philosophy will, therefore, read Stein as something of a footnote within the broader movement of Phenomenology, created by Stein's mentor Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938). Before MacIntyre lays out Stein's earliest training in and contributions to philosophy (with focus on her 1916 doctoral dissertation on EMPATHY), he feels compelled to review the status of German philosophy from around 1800 and Immanuel Kant, through Hegel and the 1850s-60s Neo-Kantian revival. Then enters Austrian mathematician turned philosopher Edmund Husserl with his new way of looking at things called phenomenology. Some of Husserl's immensely gifted students, especially Adolf Reinach and Edith Stein, pushed beyond their master into inter-personal relationships, law and politics. Versus Hume and Kant (and at certain times versus Husserl himself) Reinach and his admirer Stein found in personal experience and intuition both necessity and universal laws objectively and truly presented by the objects of consciousness themselves. This was not a popular position in neo-Kantian German philosophy and its warring universities. Alasdair MacIntyre makes a credible case that before you understand Edith Stein as a philosopher, you must come to terms with certain elements of history: medieval "realism," with its neo-Aristotelian belief that the human mind intuits essences of real objects presented to sense and memory; David Hume's denials of that thesis, Kant's creative reactions to Hume and more. -OOO- recommended reading: -- Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, G. M. Goshgarian (Translator) - THREE WOMEN IN DARK TIMES: EDITH STEIN, HANNAH ARENDT, SIMONE WEIL. -- Waltraud Herbstrith - EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY. -- Maurice Natanson - EDMUND HUSSERL: PHILOSOPHER OF INFINITE TASKS. -- Edith Stein - ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY; LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916. http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review.aspx?reviewid=1561632 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 02/18/2011 title of review: Edth Stein nursed dying soldiers and probed the philosophical depths of "empathy" rating: * * * * * review: In 2006 appeared Notre Dame University philosophy professor Alasdair MacInyre's EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE, 1913 - 1922. It covers ten years (ages 21 - 31) in the life of Edith Stein (1891 - 1942). She was born Jewish, grew up in Silesian Breslau as a Prussian citizen, stopped practicing her faith as an early teenager, plunged into the secular life of the mind, became a philosopher of no little renown, a translator, teacher and advocate of women's rights. In 1922 she was baptized a Roman Catholic. In 1933, aged 42, she became a Carmelite nun. In 1950, she and her older sister Rosa, were arrested from a Dutch convent by the Gestapo, sent by cattle car to Auschwitz and gassed to death in August 1942. In 1998 Pope John Paul II canonized Edith Stein, whose name in religion was Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce, a Catholic martyr and proclaimed her one of six patron saints of Europe. Since then students and readers have flocked to the English translations of all her major works -- for any number of different reasons. Helpfully, biographer MacIntyre draws on the English versions, including Stein's 500 page unfinished autobiography LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916. Professor MacIntyre's book is longer than it need be for general readers. Many readers would settle for Cliffs Notes summaries of Edith Stein's earliest philosophical writings over an eight year period, a sort of PHENOMENOLOGY FOR DUMMIES. But MacIntrye devotes perhaps 3/4 of his 186 page narrative to elaborate, detailed setting the stage for Stein's first handful of philosophical essays. He sketches the history of her family, reviews her schooling and first two years of university in Breslau, describes her friends among philosophy professors and fellow-students at Goettingen, Freiburg-im-Breisgau and elsewhere and her brief stint as a nurse in World War I in the typhoid ward of a 4,000 bed Austrian Army hospital. MacIntrye stresses that Stein built her adult life around the insights she won in philosophizing, and those insights came to her from many sources: disciplined reading, personal interchanges, work for her PhD under Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological method within German philosophy and her increasing attention to her once abandoned belief in God. Unlike her fellow phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (Germany's most influential 20th Century philosopher by virtue of his 1917 BEING AND TIME, and later and ardent Nazi), Stein's life was a seamless, morally consistent moral garment. Her life embodied her values at every stage in every year. Yet only six of 17 chapters of EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922 are devoted by MacIntyre directly to the texts of Edith Stein's first essays in philosophy. Those are, I think, an excellent guide to what young Stein does and does not achieve. Yet Stein's philosophical work is no longer well known even to academic philosophers, much less to general or devotional readers. The professor obviously felt that he had to devote pages 19 to 62 (Chs. 3 - 6) to the history of the milieu in which Edith Stein philosophized. It is a good, clear overview of developments beginning with David Hume and Immanuel Kant and moving past Hegel and Idealism into the neo-Kantian revival of the 1850s and 1860s which still dominated German universities in the early 20th Century. There is considerable attention -- and rightly so -- to the phenomenological method of Husserl and to the dozens of young thinkers from various lands who flocked to wherever Husserl was teaching. Edith Stein concentrated on "theory of knowledge." What do we know of the real world through our five senses? Are our bodies, our embodied souls, in direct intuitive contact with real bodies, real persons and if so how? Or do my senses give isolated me mere disconnected, chaotic impressions: colors, shapes and such like; and our imagination (Hume) or our mind (Kant) and I impose necessary order on an unknowable or barely knowable world of assumed bodies in motion? Husserl's earliest students had been attracted to him through his LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS (1900, 1901). There he seemed to be reclaiming for German thought mediaval neo-Aristotelian "realism," the belief that humans are in direct contact with the real world through their senses. Human minds receive the real world; they do not create, mould or structure extra-mental reality. The real world is made up of independently operating bodies which impact upon us. In later works, especially IDEAS (1913) Husserl seemed to an alarmed Edith Stein and others to be backtracking toward the dominant transcendental idealistic ideas of Immanuel Kant and followers. The centerpiece of MacIntyre's intellectual biography of young Stein is Chapter 9, "Stein on Our Knowledge of Other Minds": inter-personal empathy, the subject of her 1906 doctoral dissertation for Husserl. MacIntyre sees ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY as the work of a brilliant but still young philosopher, the work of a promising "apprentice." The dissertationraises more questions than it answers but they are good questions, and Stein will probe them more deeply in the years to come. Stein's subject is "empathy" (German Einfuehlung). She believes that if we pay minute attention to our consciousness, we discover that our primordial experience (versus Hume and Kant and even Husserl) is not of shapes or even mere colored bodies. Rather we directly intuit other human beings very much like ourselves as knowers and wanters. Stein's way of phenomenologizing is like the scientist's way of doing science: cooperative. There are things about myself that I can understand only when others tell me what they see in me. From these basic insights, Stein goes on to sketch a philosophy of friendship, associations, professions, society and politics. By 1922, however, she had been studying religion for years. After reading throughout one night from a friend's library the AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Carmelite Saint Teresa of Avila, Stein said to herself, "Here is the truth," and demanded immediate baptism from the local Catholic priest. She soon proved to him that she was ready for the sacrament. She also concluded that, powerful as it was, the phenomenological method could not alone lead to God. Faith, too, is needed. This is a fine book. But the more philosophy you have first read into, the more you will get out of EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 -1922. -OOO- tags: edith stein, edmund husserl, phenomenology, empathy ("Einfuehlung") http://www.amazon.com/Edith-Stein-Philosophical-Prologue -1913D1922/dp/074255953X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s= books&qid=1296766710&sr=1-1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 02/19/2011 Review Title: Edith Stein Pursued Truth as far as Philosophy Could Take Her Pros: The milieu and pre-history of early 20th century German philosophy. Early phenomenologist Edith Stein. Cons: Perhaps 40 % of the text presupposes familiarity with academic philosophy. A very demanding read. The Bottom Line: Professors and graduate students of modern philosophy will find this an easy but rewarding read. For general readers curious about a modern philosopher, religious martyr and saint: very demanding aohcapablanca's Full Review: Alasdair MacIntyre - Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue 1913 - 1922... In 1916 the German university of Freiburg im Breisgau awarded a doctoral degree in philosophy summa cum laude to Edith Stein (1891 - 1942). Her dissertation was ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY. By empathy (German Einfuehlung) Stein meant the ability of one knowing subject or person (me or the "I") to interact with another, to see the world as the other sees it, even to learn things about oneself that the other knows better, at least initially, about me than I do about myself. From the days, at least, of David Hume (1711 - 1776) philosophers all across Europe were divided on how a knowing "I" can be certain about the bodies and independent forces that common sense tells us make up "the real world" beyond and causing our sensations. Hume argued that our senses individually bring us only a mass of chaotic, unorganized impressions: sights, sounds, warmth, cold, etc., but do not put us for certain in contact with real bodies or whole anythings outside our knowing. We do not see one thing causing another thing to do anything, e.g. a cricket bat keeping a thrown ball from strking a wicket. So what makes us believe, as even Hume conceded common sense makes us believe, that there are whole, organized bodies "out there" for our own body to stumble over, be injured by; real people out there for us to love or become friends with? Hume himself said that it was imagination that made us perceive wholes instead of the fragments that consciousness "gives" us. And imagination can not, Hume argues, assure us truth. In response Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) said that not imagination but certain fixed features of my knowing mind impose order on my sense perceptions, create wholes out of perceived fragments and gave us a very limited truth about things in themselves "out there." We can not know as much for a certainty as common sense tells us that we do, but the little we do know is precious and can be studied scientifically. Then came the German Idealists of whom the greatest was G.W.F. Hegel (1770 - 1831). In 1807 appeared his PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND. Hegel showed how consciousness can embrace time, space, history, politics in a great synthesis. Hegel influenced Karl Marx and many others. But in the 1850s and 1860s, argues Notre Dame professor of philosophy Alasdair MacIntyre, the much more modest, less sweeping thinking of Kant began a resurgence. By the early 1900s neo-Kantianism dominated every philosophical faculty at every university in Germany. Kantians warred among themselves about details but presented a united front against other ways of philosophizing about knowers and the known. Then bounded upon the stage an Austrian mathematician, Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938), educated in Vienna, not Marburg or Berlin or other German universities. He revived Hegel's word "phenomenology" and used it to describe radical new ways of interpreting what our common sense tells us about the world. In 1901 Husserl published LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS, in 1913 IDEAS. Through "phenomenologizing," especially in his earliest years, Husserl revived long ignored ideas from medieval neo-Aristotelianism, including a confidence that our senses put us directly in touch with real external essences, causes and forces, with whole, organized, purposeful bodies and persons outside our individual knowing egos. Husserl's book, IDEAS, however, to many of his students, including his admiring graduate assistant Edith Stein, seemed a falling away back towards the strait jacket reservations about sense knowledge of Kant and the neo-Kantians. If Kant is right, there is little certainty about the world outside our closed knowing egos. Husserl's impact was immediate and endures to this day. Important thinkers whom Husserl's phenomenology influenced include Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Max Scheler and longtime professor of philosophy Karol Wojtyla, better known as Pope John Paul II. A lesser philosophical luminary, but one in closest contact with the disorganized manuscripts of her "dear Master" Husserl himself, was young Edith Stein. Like Wojtyla, Stein is better known for her overall life than for her few years in academic philosophy. For she was gassed as a baptized Jew by Nazis at Auschwitz in 1942. In 1998 a fellow phenomenologist Pope John Paul II declared her a Christian martyr and one of six patron saints of Europe. For Stein had been baptized Roman Catholic in 1922. In 1933 at age 42 she became a contemplative Carmelite nun of the Order of Saint Teresa of Avila), choosing the name Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce ("of the Cross"). Stein's life up to her religious conversion in 1922 is told by Professor MacIntyre in his 2006 EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922. He devotes close to 3/4 of his 17 chapters of text to framing the life, times and especially philosophical milieu of Edith Stein. Only the bulk of some six chapters goes to presenting Stein's 1916 dissertation on EMPATHY and a handful of other early phenomenological works on society and politics. MacIntyre's EDITH STEIN is a compelling, instructive book. MacIntyre argues that there is a striking consistency in Edith Stein's life, her search for truth, her philosophizing, her friendships and her return to religion. She became what she thought (and prayed) herself into being. This personal, psychic wholeness MacIntyre contrasts with her onetime colleague Martin Heidegger, who became the most influential 20th Century German philosopher, while throwing in his lot with Hitler as a very vocal Nazi. Husserl's phenomenological method invited his students and colleagues to look afresh at both the sense worlds and the real worlds of ordinary common sense. Forget Hume and Kant, said Husserl, drop your prejudices and preconceptions. Simply look at what you are perceiving. This is far from easy. But it turns out, he argues, that if you are honest and are minutely precise in what you describe you and others will perceive not shapes but bodies. Some bodies, starting with your own, turn out to be ensouled, with appetites, wills and minds. Edith Stein and others found in their personal consciousness an awareness, an intuitive awareness -- not something they had to reason to -- of other persons much like themselves. How was this possible, asked Edith Stein? What conditions must be thus and so to make it possible for me to place myself inside the emotions and consciousness of other people? Phenomenological methods of Husserl gave her the tools. Professor MacIntyre underlines the significance for her thinking about empathy (German Einfuehlung) of Stein's several months wartime volunteer service beginning in April 1915 in the typhoid ward of a 4,000 bed Austrian Army hospital for infectious diseases. There she learned to work with ill and dying soldiers speaking many languages and from a far more diverse social milieu than she had previously encountered growing up in a happy Jewish family in Breslau -- Prussian Silesia. How did she communicate with them and they with her? What was the work of gestures, sighs, groans and smiles? All of Stein's major works are now available in English, including her 500 page autobiography, LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916, essays in philosophy, on women's political and professional rights, letters, translations of Cardinal Newman and Thomas Aquinas into German and reflections on religion, prayer and mystical union with God and the crucified Jesus. Stein offered her life in partial atonement for the terrible sins of once baptized Christians like Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and others against her Jewish people. In 1933 she urged in vain Pope Pius XI to thunder against Nazi anti-Semitism. In her own life she felt that she was drawing on the deepest treasures of Judaism and Christianity. On the other hand, in the years before 1922 Edith Stein was a resolutely secular, rationalist seeker of truth. She went, she judged, as far as the limits of phenomenology could take anyone. But it could not carry philosophers as far as God. -OOO- p. s. Thank you PESTYSIDE/Patsy for making EDITH STEIN reviewable for epinions.com. Recommended: Yes =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/macintyre_stein.html |