Edith  Stein

ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY

    
        Publisher: ICS Pubns; 3rd Revised edition (October 1989)
       Paperback: 135 pages
        ISBN-10: 9780935216110

reviewed by Patrick Killough

(1) biblio.com 05/10/2011

Would you recommend this book to other readers? * * * Might

review:

I have heard it said that all subsequent philosophy after the 4th Century BC in Greece is commentary on Plato. And also that all much more recent philosophy is a debate with David Hume (1711 - 1776). The subject of this book review is an English translation of the 1916 doctoral dissertation in German of Edith Stein (1891 - 1942). Stein was a student of Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology, and for him she wrote her 1916 dissertation on THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY.

Like her master Husserl and other phenomenologists, young Edith Stein must have always had David Hume somewhere in the back of her mind. Like Hume, both Husserl and all his students (including Martin Heidegger) at one time or another asked themselves: What is it that I perceive through my five senses? Do those perceptions put me beyond any shadow of doubt in touch with real, independently existing objects outside my individual knowing self?

To oversimplify his position: Hume held that our senses give us nothing directly but a chaos of colors, smells, flavors, sounds, prickles -- all unorganized. We ourselves through memory and imagination organize the raw data into cause and effect, into place and time and into a supposedly real external world. But, for Hume, men cannot possibly be sure if there is anything really "out there" beyond our senses.

Husserl, Stein and other phenomenologists thought that Hume erred. For he did not really look carefully and dispassionately at what he sensed, at whatever phenomena we are in contact with. He brought to his perceiving too many prejudices and preconceptions. He did more than just perceive.

To phenomenologists, if I am honest and accurate, at any moment when I focus on what I am perceiving (abandoning all preconceptions), I do not perceive chaos. I perceive, for instance, a white screen onto which I am typing this review. In her 1916 dissertation, Edith Stein moves from such personal perceptions step by step, layer of consciousness by layer, to perceive herself perceiving her own solid body as "here"; not only that but another body as "there." And she perceives herself moving from here to there. And the other moving from there to here. She perceives her own consciousness and her own will causing the movements of her own body.

Through "empathy," Stein, you, I, anyone just looking at the data, then knows beyond doubt that some of those other bodies "out there" do not depend on our individual consciousness, rather, those bodies are conscious like me, indeed, "ensouled." Through empathy, I know their thoughts and feelings and they know mine. 

Scholars say that Stein drew on her World War I experience as a nurse in an Austrian army hospital for men with infectious diseases. There brilliant linguist Stein quickly developed a fair working proficiency in eight different Austro-Hungarian army languages, including Ruthenian. She held soldiers' and civilians' hands as they died. She emptied their bedpans. She changed their linen. She corresponded with their loved ones. Edith Stein also learned to see their facial expressions as identical with the emotions behind those grimaces.

After this point in her 1916 dissertation, onetime psychology major Stein began to sketch a complete theory of the human person -- in the end, only hinted at in her 1916 paper, but soon to be developed in follow-on documents. Indeed ere many years had passed, this brilliant young philosopher had developed a philosophy of man in society and man in the state.

Edith Stein's ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY is the work of a very young and "new" philosopher. It is not without flashes of originality and evidence of thorough scholarship. But it is an apprentices's work. More questions are raised than are answered. It seems clear that in her own mind, Stein intended her dissertation to be no more than a first step into a lifetime career in academic philosophy.

Alas, Stein soon discovered that even in enlightened post World War I Prussia in particular and Germany in general she bumped up against a double glass ceiling: for she was both a woman and a Jew. She wanted to become the first tenured woman professor of philosophy at a German University. But, despite the originality and brilliance of subsequent writings designed to win her that position, she failed.

She lived, fortunately, a great follow-on life, first as teacher of girls, then convert to Christianity then as lecturer around Europe on feminism and women in the professions, then as a Carmelite nun and finally an executed martyr in 1942 at Auschwitz. Edith Stein is now a canonized Roman Catholic saint. And many Jews and Christians are painfully evaluating the workability of her personal prayer to be a bridge forever between the Torah of Judaism and the Cross of Jesus Christ.

Who should read Edith Stein's 1916 dissertation on Empathy? It is not for everyone. There are many other works of hers far less knotty for general readers to grasp, starting with her autobiography, LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891-1916. Her dissertation text is densely reasoned, sprinkled, it is true, with examples. But it is a book for academic philosophy majors with considerable prior familiarity with David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. It is not a literary or even a philosophical masterpiece. But it is a great start for a young philosopher with several cultural and political strikes against her. 

-OOO-

http://www.biblio.com/books/377921355.html
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(2) lunch.com 05/11/2011

name of review:  How do I know you? How can you see things as I see them? Answer: through EMPATHY!

rating: * * * *

review:

I give a four star rating to Dr Waltraut Stein's English translation of the 1916 German doctoral dissertation by Edith Stein: ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY. Waltraut is Edith Stein's great niece.

That high rating is a composite:

-- ease of understanding by the general reader: ONE star;

-- hard work, accuracy of the English and scholarship by the translator: FIVE stars;

-- historical importance as an early philosophical study of empathy: FOUR stars;

-- easy understandability of text by graduate students familiar with modern philosophy: FOUR stars;

-- help to the general reader as the only work he/she has yet read on empathy: THREE stars;

-- importance within the biography of a (temporarily, since age 14) atheistic Jewish woman who hit a glass ceiling in the academia of post-World War I Germany: FIVE Stars.

In short, Edith Stein's 1916 doctoral dissertation at the University of Freiburg for Professor Edmund Husserl, founder of the academic philosophy's school of Phenomenology, is intrinsically valuable, but very, very tough reading for a well-read general reader without formal training in the history and methods of modern philosophy. And, I fear, that describes a lot of readers of reviews submitted to lunch.com.

But then how much fun would you expect to get from reading your nephew's doctoral dissertation on mathematical meteorology or some stranger's refereed journal article about string theory?

Think of Edith Stein's EMPATHY as part of an endless technical debate among philosophers with the Scottish genius David Hume (1711 - 1776). Hume thought it very unlikely that our five senses put us directly in touch with a real, solid world of things and people. What our senses bring us, Hume argued, is a confused jumble of colors, buzzes, tinglings, flavors and aromas. It's our imagination, our memory, our association of ideas that brings order out of chaos, says Hume, and makes us believe in a real external world independent of my individual consciousnes, full of causes and effects and real live people just like me. But we can't be sure that there is anything really "out there."

"Whoa there," counters Edith Stein! Let's be honest, she says. Let's each of us look without preconditions at what we are actually experiencing right now. My senses do not drown me in phenomena that are chaotic, unconnected. Right now I, for instance, see my hands typing a book review. I sense my breathing. I see people walking by outside my study window. I am here. They are there. But if I choose, I can stand up and replace my here with their there. And they have the power to move from there to here. From their facial gestures, I sense the same kind of pain and pleasure that I feel myself.

I am soon aware that I am just one point zero of consciousness in a world full of ensouled bodies like mine. Those other people are able to empathize their way into my mind as I am into theirs. Indeed, there are true things about myself that I know only because others, as it were, hold up a mirror to my own thoughts, prejudices and behaviors.

That world of knowing the inner workings of other through empathy is what Stein explores from a philosophical rather than a psychological point of view. Her big philosophical questions are:
-- is empathy a valid way of knowing?
-- and what makes empathy possible?

Stein was something of pioneer of empathy in 1916. But in her dissertation she continually dissects earlier views on and explanations of empathy by Max Scheler, Wilhelm Dilthey and others. Over the next few years, Edith Stein fleshed out her ideas on empathy, applied them to a metaphysics of the human person and then to man in society and man in the State. Her reasoning in 1916 is tight. The illustrative examples are not exactly abstract but not precisely memorable either. ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY is the work of an apprentice philoospher, not yet a master. Her book is a tough, albeit rewarding read.

A very good, short, scholarly description and critique of Stein's 1916 work on EMPATHY is provided by philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's 2006 EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922. See chapter 9, "Stein on Our knowledge of Other Minds."

I recommend that you read other works of Stein before tackling her 1916 dissertation on EMPATHY. You might start with her her autobiography, edited and translated into English by Carmelite nun Josephine Koeppel as LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891-1916. This reminiscense was dashed off by Stein in the early days of Hitler after Stein had been a Roman Catholic for over a decade and was in the process of becoming a Carmelite nun.

And choose as well among the growing number of Stein biographies. Alasdair MacIntyre's EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROGLOGUE 1913 - 1922 traces the mental growth of a young genius. Not bad (but, unlike Alasdair's work, not much help with Stein's philosophizing) is EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY. It is by German PhD Carmelite nun Waltraud Herbstrith, a noted Stein scholar.

Edith Stein's conversion to Christianity had been hard for her family, especially for her devout Jewish mother, to take. But during the two decades that remained of her life, both as Catholic laywoman, teacher, philosopher and intellectual and later as nun and mystical thinker, Edith Stein maintained stoutly the unity of her Jewish-Christian identity. Indeed she was executed by Nazis at Auschwitz in 1942 because she was Jewish and to cow Catholic bishops of the Netherlands (where Stein had sought refuge a few years earlier) who had publicly protested a few days earlier against deportation of all Jews, not just Christians.

Stein was beatified in 1987 by Polish former Professor of philosophy, phenomenologist Carol Wojtyla, at the time Pope John Paul II. In 1998 the same philosopher Pope declared her Saint Teresia Benedicta of the Cross. She is popularly called Saint Edith Stein. Both Christians and Jews wrestle with Edith Stein's prayer that her foreseen death would deepen Jewish-Christian understanding and love, though that can scarcely be said to have happened yet. -OOO-

http://www.lunch.com/Reviews/d/Edith_Stein_
ON_THE_PROBLEM_OF_EMPATHY-1724201.html
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(3) bn.com 05/12/2011

title of review:  I know you. You know me. That's EMPATHY!

rating: * * * *

review:


I address this book review to the average educated American who has no repeat no background in academic philosophy.
{DISCLAIMER: Nearly half a century ago I was happily immersed in academic philosophy for seven years. Then I abandoned philosophizing and history of Greek and Medieval Philosophy for a three-decade career in the Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State. I have recently begun a gingerly return to philosophy, starting with "phenomenology" and the works of its German-speaking founder Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938) and his leading disciples such as the precocious Edith Stein (1891 - 1942). END DISCLAIMER.}

I am reviewing a sound but old English translation from German of Edith Stein's 1916 doctoral dissertation for Freiburg University's Professor Husserl. The translation is by Edith's great-niece Waltraud Stein and it helped Waltraud earn her Master's Degree at Ohio University. The dissertation's title in English is "ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY."

Where is Edith Stein is going in this early work of hers? Assuming that I know myself directly, body, imagination, spirit, etc. accurately, is the same true of what my senses tell me of bodies other than mine, including those that move in space, have memories and wills, make decisions, i.e. are "ensouled bodies?" Yes, says Stein. Empathy is a reliable, correctible form of true knowledge. There are other ensouled bodies "out there," Stein asserts. I can exchange my "here" for their "there," and they can return the favor to me. I know what is going on in their minds from what their faces and body language tell me. And they do the same for me. Indeed, the world is made up of vast numbers of ensouled bodies, each its own "zero-point" of reference. This method of knowing Stein, along with earlier thinkers like Merleau-Ponty and Scheler calls "empathy." Her dissertation is a classic text on the philosophical underpinnings of that unique form of knowing.

In later works Edith Stein deepened and further applied Husserl's methods of phenomenological analysis and reduction and expanded upon what she had learned in EMPATHY into the nature of the human individual and to the lives of men and women in both Society and the State. Edith and her older sisterRosa were taken from a Carmelite convent in the Netherlands and a few days later murdered by Nazis at Auschwitz in 1942. Edith Stein is a canonized Catholic saint. Philosophizing was an important part of her great life, but only a part. She also prayed incessantly to reconcile the Torah of Judaism and the Cross of Christ.

Bottom line: Edith Stein has much to teach educated Americans of all faiths and walks of life. But her dissertation on EMPATHY, is not the best, certainly not the easiest, place to start. Read first her autobiography, LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916. If you feel that you must read EMPATHY right now, no matter how little prepared, I suggest that from time to time you open Stein's dissertation at random and read and reflect upon a few sentences at a time. There are nuggets in every paragraph. Taking my own advice just now given, I discovered,

"I do not 'forget' my friends, even when I am not thinking of them. They then belong to the unnoticed present horizon of my world. My love for them is living, even when I am not living in it" (Chapter III, "The Constitution of the Psycho-Physical Individual").

-OOO-


recommended reading:

-- Waltraud Herbstrith - EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre - EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922.

-- Edith Stein - LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916.

http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review.aspx?reviewid=1656971
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(4) amazon.com 05/13/2011

title of review: Edith Stein's 1916 EMPATHY: A Classic but not for Everyone

rating: * * * *

review:

In 1916, 25-year old Edith Stein wrote a doctoral dissertation, ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY. Empathy she described as a way of knowing other people as beings like ourselves. Her major philosophical questions were:

-- (1) Is empathy a form of knowledge that reaches truth?

-- (2) If so, how do you or I correct empathy when it makes mistakes?

-- (3) What makes empathy possible?

Edith Stein (1891 - 1942) was a brilliant Jewish-Christian thinker whose importance is more widely appreciated day by day. She was canonized as Saint Teresia Benedicta of the Cross by Pope John Paul II in 1998. She was raised conventionally Jewish in Polish-Prussian Breslau, but became a precocious atheist at age 14. At two German universities (Goettingen and Freiburg) she studied first psychology, then philosophy. Her dissertation director was the great Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938) founder of the experience-oriented school of Phenomenology. In her 1916 dissertation, Edith Stein, who had already won a medal for service as a near-Russian-front line nurse early in World War I, applied Husserl's phenomenological methods to the subject of our ways of knowing other persons as persons like ourselves: empathy. By 1916 there was not much written by psychologists or philosophers about our ability to see things from other's perspectives, to intuit their mental states from their frowns, their laughter, their dismissive hand gestures.

But Edith Stein laid out her own ideas, while reviewing those of other pioneers of empathy such as Max Scheler, Eugene Merleau-Ponty and Wilhelm Dilthey. At a deeper level Stein disagrees with the earlier sceptical views of David Hume on whether we can know a world outside our own senses. To paraphrase Hume, our eyes only bring us a disorganized jumble of colors, our ears sounds, our tongues sour and salty tastes, etc. There is nothing but chaos in the raw data of our senses. And yet that is not what we experience: we see a window between us and a willow tree; we hear a symphony, we feel another's cold or sweaty hands when we shake them. Hume explained this perceived common sense order and roundedness in our experiences as things that our psyches add to, impose on the raw data, through association of ideas, memory and imagination.

Edith Stein's take was different. And she would invite readers to make their own experiments independently confirming hers.

We experience ourselves causing one of our thoughts to replace another. We experience ourselves choosing to move our bodies from my "here" to your "there" and you doing the same thing in reverse. We use words for what is happening to us, words and sentences from languages  and via cultural prisms that we have inherited from others.

Stein is thought to be the first philosopher to notice how phenomena look different when we are tired or ill. She gives hundred of examples, e.g. of how you can be healthy even with a broken arm. Stein asserts that our senses put us in touch with a real world of bodies, some of them "ensouled" bodies outside our personal consciousness and awareness. Using techniques created by Edmund Husserl, Stein dissects nuances of friendship and the structure and unity of the human person. She thereby, in this 1916 apprenctice's dissertation, lays the groundwork for her more profound follow-on philosophical studies of man in society and man in the state.

Who can read Stein's EMPATHY without having to make special preparations?

-- Only philosophy students familiar with phenomenology and existentialism (especially that of Martin Heidegger, like Stein an outstanding student of Professor Husserl).

Who should want to read Stein's EMPATHY?

-- Persons devoted for whatever reason to Saint Edith Stein. They may already know her mystical writings as a Carmelite nun. They may have read Stein's warm autobiography of her early years, LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916. Such readers want more information as to how the Saint moved from Judaism to atheism to philosophizing to her 1922 Baptism.

If you are not, alas, au courant with 20th Century Continental philosophy, what is a good way to read EMPATHY?

-- Edith Stein's EMPATHY is a doctoral dissertation. It is scientific, scholarly, argumentative and often abstract. Stein's great-niece Waltraut Stein, decades ago, as part of a Master's Degree project for Ohio University, translated Stein's dissertation into workable English. And that is probably the text that you will read. If you try to read EMPATHY straight through from beginning to end without a guide, you may feel that you are tackling a philosophical cousin of James Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE. Very tough going.

Help is thankfully available. First read philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's 2006 EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922. His Chapter 9, "Stein on Our Knowledge of Other Minds," gives the highlights of EMPATHY and in context of their times.

Finally, there is another, simpler way to tackle Stein's dissertation. I have found it helpful simply to open EMPATHY at random, anywhere. As some people do with texts of Scripture. Read three or four sentences slowly then meditate on them. You can't read a paragraph without being struck by provocative, wise insights or at least by accurate observations of phenomena or by discussions of the history of philosophy. For instance:

(My living body has a) "second constituent ... its position at the zero point of orientation. The living body cannot be separated from the givenness of the spatial outer world. The other's physical body as a mere physical body is spatial like other things and is given at a certain location, at a certain distance from me as the center of spatial orientation, and in certain spatial relationships to the rest of the spatial world. When I now interpret it as a sensing living body and empathically project myself into it, I obtain a new image" (Ch. 3).

With her 1916 EMPATHY Edith Stein launched a vary serious personal effort to break through the glass ceiling preventing women from becoming tenured faculty members of German universities. It did not help that she was also Jewish. Soon enough, even more profound philosophical works failed to win her admission to an exclusively male, overwhelmingly non-Jewish elite world of German university professors. But Stein went on to make a name for herself as lecturer on women's rights to intellectual careers. Then, under Hitler, at age 41, Stein became a cloistered nun. In her every incarnation, scholars and the general public are finding things to like about Saint Teresia Benedicta of the Cross -- Edith Stein.

-OOO-

http://www.amazon.com/Problem-Empathy-Collected-Works-Edith/
dp/0935216111/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1301481455&sr=1-1
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(5) epinions.com 05/17/2011 

Review Title: A future Saint's 1916 doctoral dissertation in philosophy: Edith Stein on EMPATHY
by aohcapablanca, May 17 '11

Reviewer's rating of Edith Stein - ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY  * * * *

Review by AOHCAPABLANCA

Who on earth reads a decades old English translation of a 1916 German dissertation "ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY?"
-- (1) Philosophy professors and majors with considerable knowledge of late 19th and early 20th Century academic philosophizing. They tackle Edmund Husserl the father of the phenomenological school in German philosophy and its transformation in the hands of star pupils of Husserl such as Martin Heidegger and Edith Stein. For such well prepared specialists, Edith Stein's dissertation is a pleasant, informative stroll in the park a la Socrates in Athens.

-- (2) Non-philosophizing fans and devotees of Edith Stein (1891-1942), a Carmelite nun and mystical writer canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1998 as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

-- (3) Students of the World War II Jewish Holocaust, especially of executed Jewish converts to Christianity, such as Stein and her older sister Rosa -- at Auschwitz in 1942. They will have read Stein's autobiography, LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891-1916, dashed off in Cologne during the early days of the  political power of Adolph Hitler and German Nazis.

-- (4) People praying with the Saint herself that the life of Edith Stein will reveal the unfathomable love of God for all mankind, especially for his Chosen People the Jews and for Christians who glory, as did Stein, in the Jewishness of the founder of their religion. Also people who resent Stein's canonization as a Christian rather than a Jewish martyr.

-- (5) Young non-philosophical Carmelite nuns (at least so I imagine) more or forced by their novice mistresses to dip into the massive writings of their sister in religion, Edith Stein.

-- (6) Feminists who have learned that for ten years, after her baptism but before she became a nun, Edith Stein was a powerful lay voice across Europe for women's rights, especially to careers, especially intellectual careers, including breaking through the glass ceiling preventing women from becoming Professors at post World War One Prussian universities.

-- (7) Rationalist and atheists. At age 14, conventionally Jewish Edith Stein stopped praying and became an atheist. For the next decade and a third, Stein had no time for religion as something either powerful or true. But the conversions of so many of Stein's brilliant Jewish friends to Lutheranism or Catholicism made her take a fresh look at religion. Some even see Edith Stein as "the patron saint of hard-thinking atheists."

Young Edith Stein was one of Europe's most brilliant, original academic philosophers. She died a philosopher. But by age 30 she knew that for her philosophy was not enough. Husserl's way of philosophizing (phenomenology) was brilliant, analytical, tough-minded but utterly "this worldly." She moved beyond Husserl into realms recently explored by "Oxford Movement" founder John Henry Newman (whom Stein translated into German), with his sense from his cradle and nursery that God was present in his conscience. With Plato, Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, Edith Stein went beyond phenomena of sense into a transcendental world of Ideas, an unmoved mover and a world creator possessed of will and intellect.
All that having been said by way of Preface:

how should an educated but non-philosophical novice tackle Stein's 1916 dissertation,  ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY?
-- (1) For non-philosophy majors: I do not recommend just picking up EMPATHY and plowing straight through it. Any more than I would have you do James Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE. It is just too technical, too densely reasoned and presupposes too much knowledge of modern European philosophizing.

-- (2) A notably good layman's introduction to the content and context of Stein's EMPATHY is provided by philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his 2006 EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922. If all you want to know is Edith Stein's early views on empathy, skip straight to Chapter 9, "Stein On Our Knowledge of Other Minds." Here at least you will find the highlights of where Stein was beginning, where she was trying to go in 1916 and what insights into empathy would soon lead Stein to move ahead boldly with philosophical works on the unity of the human person, man in society and man in the state.

-- (3) There is something oracular about the text of Stein's EMPATHY. That is, it lends itself to your picking any text at random, reading three or four sentences, then putting the book down, closing your eyes and meditating on what the young apprentice philosopher has just said.


What you will thus pick at random will be either something about other recent pioneers of empathy as a valid form of knowledge or dissection of hundreds of individually sampled phenomena presenting themselves to the consciousness or memory of Edith Stein (a method that works just as well for you and for me as it did for her) or even broader, at times cosmic, speculations.

Watch this.

I am about to open 1916's ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY at random and copy out what I find there for you. Aha, page 5, Chapter II, "The Essence of Acts of Empathy":
"The world in which we live is not only a world of physical bodies, but also of experiencing subjects external to us, of whose experiences we know. This knowledge is not indubitable. Precisely here we are subject to such diverse deceptions that occasionally we are inclined to doubt the possibility of knowledge in this domain at all."

And here is another page I open at random, p. 92, Chapter IV, "Empathy As The Understanding of Spiritual Persons:
"We have already taken along the 'I' of the foreign living body as a spiritual subject by interpreting this body as the center of orientation of the spatial world. ... Similarly, in every literal act of empathy, i.e., in every comprehension of an act of feeling, we have already penetrated into the realm of the spirit ('Geist'). ... This is the world of values. In joy the subject has something joyous facing him, in fright something frightening, in fear something threatening. For him who is cheerful, the world is bathed in a rosy glow; for him who is depressed, bathed in black. And all this is co-given with acts of feeling as belonging to them. It is primarily appearances of expression that grant us access to these experiences."

I hope that this review gives a general reader enough insight into Edith Stein's pioneering dissertation on EMPATHY to support a reasoned decision to read EMPATHY either right now, later or never --  after reading Stein's autobiography or after reading Alasdair MacIntyre's Chapter Four and then deciding whether to tackle Stein head on. In any case, Husserl, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, Dilthey, Scheler and others discussed by Edith Stein have important insights into that mysterious "empathy" by which are able to place ourselves in other's shoes if not their minds and to read their facial and bodily expressions as direct expressions of their souls. And those others return the favor to us, also by empathy.

-OOO-

p.s. my thanks to Epinions "BOOKS" co-gatekeeper PestySide Patsy for making EMPATHY reviewable by me and other epinionators.
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Pros:
Ably translated. How we know others through Empathy and they us. Brilliant. Original. Atheistic rationalism.

Cons:
A wartime doctoral dissertation: densely reasoned, work of an apprentice philosopher, not yet a master.

The Bottom Line:
Must reading for philosophy students specializing in existentialism or phenomenology. Not easily read by non-philosophers without considerable advance preparation. Pick passages at random: read and meditate. Much truth.

Overall Product Rating:  * * * *

Recommended: Yes.


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http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/stein_empathy.htm