The Philosophy of Edith Stein

Many an interested person will have put aside a work by Edith Stein due to its seeming inaccessibility, aware that there was something important there for a future occasion. This essay collection attempts to give a key to reading Stein's various works. It is divided into two parts reflecting her development, «Phenomenology» and «Metaphysics».

Many interested reader will have put aside a work by Edith Stein due to its seeming inaccessibility, with the awareness that there was something important there for a future occasion. This collection of essays attempts to provide an idea of what this important something might be and give a key to the reading of Stein's various works. It is divided into two parts reflecting Stein's development. The first part, «Phenomenology», deals with those features of Stein's work that set it apart from that of other phenomenologists, notably Husserl. The second part is entitled «Metaphysics», although Stein the phenomenologist would, like Husserl, initially have shied away from this designation. However, as Stein gradually understood the importance of the Christian faith for completing the phenomenological project of founding the sciences, and accepted it as indispensable for a philosophical view of the whole, her «attempt at an ascent to the meaning of being» can legitimately be called metaphysics, even as it also constitutes a fundamental criticism of Aristotle and Aquinas.

Auteur

Mette Lebech has been a lecturer in philosophy at Maynooth University since 1998. She holds degrees in philosophy from the universities of Copenhagen, Louvain-la-Neuve and Leuven and has lectured and published widely on human dignity, bioethics and the philosophy of Edith Stein. Her publications include On the Problem of Human Dignity: A Hermeneutical and Phenomenological Investigation (2009), which employs Stein s phenomenology to explore the experiential necessity of the idea of human dignity. She is the founding President of the International Association for the Study of the Philosophy of Edith Stein (IASPES). Her current research interest is in phenomenological value theory.

Contenu

Contents: Edith Stein as a European Philosopher - The Constitution of the Body - Motivation and Value - The Motivated Constitution of the State - An Analysis of Human Dignity pace Stein - The Formation of Christian Europe - Education of the Human Person - Woman - Phenomenology and Thomism - Beginning to Read Finite and Eternal Being - Heidegger and the Meaning of Being - A Steinian Approach to Dementia.