"this volume, "written by a beginner for beginners" bears the imprint of the extraordinary intellectual and spiritual journey of its author, one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century. born in Breslau into a practicing Jewish family in 1891, Edith Stein abandoned her faith as a teenager and later became a key figure among the early disciples of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. ........." [from back cover]

Finite and Eternal Being bears the imprint of the extraordinary intellectual and spiritual journey of its author. Throughout her precocious youth, her conversion to Catholicism, her life as a Discalced Carmelite nun, and all the way to her martyrdom at the hands of National Socialism, Edith Stein's entire life was a consistent seeking after the truth. After her conversion in 1921, Stein sought to reconcile the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, her previous intellectual master, with the thought of the new intellectual and spiritual masters she found in the Thomistic and Carmelite traditions. Stein produced this volume in the mid-1930s as a complete reworking of her earlier study of being, Potency and Act, and as her final synthesis of phenomenology with Thomistic metaphysics, Carmelite spirituality, modern scientific discoveries, spiritual and psychological debates about the soul, and Trinitarian theology. Starting from the most fundamental principles, the author takes us on a journey through a wide range of classic philosophical themes, such as potency and act, substance and accidents, matter and form, and time and eternity. Stein engages with the great thinkers of the past (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, Scotus) and of modern times (e.g., Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Przywara, Conrad-Martius). Ascending to the meaning of being, she demonstrates how all finite being finds its ultimate ground in the eternal Divine Being, the Creator, whose Trinitarian nature is reflected throughout creation. Stein concludes with two appendices?appearing here for the first time in English?"Martin Heidegger's Philosophy of Existence" and "The Interior Castle," a study of St. Teresa of Ávila's mystical treatise. This new translation of Finite and Eternal Being inaugurates a new series, Edith Stein: The Complete Works: Critical English Edition, which replaces the existing series of Stein's writings, also published by ICS Publications. This volume, the twelfth in the new series, brings the recently completed German critical editions (Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe) to the English-speaking world.

Thine Own Self investigates Stein's account of human individuality and her mature philosophical positions on being and essence. Sarah Borden Sharkey shows how Stein's account of individual form adapts and updates the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition in order to account for evolution and more contemporary insights in personality and individual distinctiveness.

Being Unfolded responds to the question, ‘What is the meaning of being for Edith Stein.’ In Finite and Eternal Being Stein tentatively concludes that ‘being is the unfolding of meaning.’ Neither Stein nor her commentators have elaborated much on this suggestive phrase. Thomas Gricoski argues that Stein’s mature metaphysical project can be developed into an ‘ontology of unfolding.’ The differentiating factor of this ontology is its resistance to both existentialism and essentialism. The ‘ontology of unfolding’ is irreducibly relational. Being Unfolded proceeds by testing a relational hypothesis against Stein’s theory of the modes of being (actual, essential, and mental being). From the phenomenological perspective, Gricoski examines Stein’s theory of the relation of consciousness and being. From the scholastic perspective, he examines Stein’s account of the relation of essence and existence in material being, living being, and human being. And from both perspectives he considers the relation of divine being to actual being and their essences. This book is limited to Stein’s theory of the meaning of being, without making an explicit confrontation with Heidegger. It offers two primary contributions to Stein studies: a systematic analysis of Stein’s modes of being, especially essential being, and an exposition and expansion of her overlooked concept of unfolding. Being Unfolded also contributes to the broader field of contemporary metaphysics by developing Stein’s theory of being as an experiment in fundamental ontology. While other relational ontologies focus on relations between beings, this exploration of unfolding examines being’s inner self-relationality.

Potency and Act is the second of three works in which Edith Stein said she endeavored to fulfill her “proper mission’ in philosophy, her “life’s task”: relating the phenomenology of her teacher Edmund Husserl and the scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas. But more than “critically comparing” the two ways of thinking, she wished to “fuse” them into her own “philosophical system,” searching for that perennial philosophy lying “beyond ages and peoples, common to all who honestly seek truth.” More Information Edith Stein was a Jewish phenomenologist who became a Catholic after reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Jesus and entered the order of Discalced Carmelites founded by the saint. Stein died in Auschwitz in 1942 and was herself canonized in 1998 as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Her philosophical thinking had been formed by Husserl, but she came to “find a home in Aquinas’s thought world.” In Potency and Act she “aimed to get from scholasticism to phenomenology and vice versa” and “allow the two ways of doing philosophy to come to resolution within herself.” The first of the three works in which she carried out her mission was a play where Husserl and Aquinas appear on stage to discuss their agreements and differences (in Knowledge and Faith, ICS Publications, Edith Stein’s Collected Works, vol. 8). The second, Potency and Act, was written in 1931 but published for the first time in 1998. The third was her major work, Finite and Eternal Being, written around 1935 and also published posthumously, in 1950 (Collected Works, vol. 9). Potency and Act is complementary to Finite and Eternal Being, for they are quite different in content. The approach to the study of being in Potency and Act is “modal” as the title implies; her treatment of possible worlds and of form prescribing possibilities relates to phenomenological themes and also to recent developments in logical semantics. Philosophy of religion, of course, is a central concern. We reach God not only through faith and contemplation, she says, but “by thinking,” using “logical reasoning” both from the world without (as in St. Thomas) and from the world within (“the way of St. Augustine”); indeed, God’s existence is also a “purely formal conclusion.” Her many searching analyses are suggestive in their own right: on human freedom, temporality, self-knowledge, individuality, evolution (which she “fits into the “scholastic world view”), atheism, eschatology.

Joseph Palmisano explores the interreligious significance of empathy for Jewish-Christian understanding. Drawing on the writings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) and Edith Stein (1891-1942), he develops a phenomenological category of empathy defined as a way of ''re-membering'' oneself with the religious other. Palmisano follows Heschel's and Stein's personal and spiritual journeys through the darkest years of Nazi Germany. He shows that Heschel's call to Christian interlocutors for a return to God is an ecumenical call to humanity to embrace perceived others: a call to live life as a response to God's pathos. This call finds a prophetic answer in Edith Stein's witness of empathy with regard to the Holocaust. Stein, a Catholic, creates a dialectical bridge with the Jewish 'other,' neither distancing herself nor denying her Jewish roots. Stein's simultaneously Jewish and Christian fidelity is a model for interreligious relations. It is also a challenge to Catholics to remember their religion's Jewish heritage through new categories of witnessing and belonging with others. Beyond the Walls is a critical contribution to the fostering of interreligious understanding, offering both a model of the ideal Jewish-Christian relationship in Heschel and Stein and criteria with which to evaluate contemporary initiatives and controversies concerning interreligious dialogue.

An anthology of work from the last twelve years of Stein's life as she tried to integrate phenomenology and Christianity.