STEIN, EDITH (Sister TERESA BENEDETTA of the Cross). - Born a Jew on 12 Oct. 1891 in Breslau; converted to Catholicism; died - torn from the Carmel of Echt in Holland by the Nazi SS -
Stein, Edith - Portrait
(Freiburg 1920).
in a gas chamber at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1942, probably on 10 Aug.
A pupil and later assistant of E. HUSSERL, EDMUND (v.) at Göttingen and at Freiburg in Brisgau, her speculative activity was directed toward a rapprochement between the phenomenological method and the gnoseology and Thomist metaphysics. In her view, one can indeed rely on St Thomas (De verit., q. 10) to recognize in the world of immanence a character more immediate than that of the external world..., because in reflexive knowledge act and object are in a certain sense one and the same thing and it is therefore closer to the knowledge of God than to the knowledge of external things (cf. La phénoménologie, Juvisy 1932, p. 85).
The principal theoretical studies of S. were published in the Jahrbuch f. Phänomenologie u. phän. Forschung of Husserl from 1917 to 1929. In particular: Husserls Phänomenologie u. die Philosophie des hl. Thomas von Aquino, in Festschrift E. Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, Halle a. S. 1929, pp. 315-38. She translated St Thomas (Untersuchungen über die Wahrheit, 2 vols., 1931, 1935) and the letters with Newman’s Diary (1928). She also published a collection of moral studies: Das Ethos der Frauenberufe (1931). The publication of her main works is in progress. Hitherto two unpublished works have appeared edited by L. Gelder-R. Leeven: I. Kreuzeswissenschaft, Studie über Joannes a Cruce (Louvain-Freiburg 1950); II. Endliches und ewiges Sein, Versuch eines Aufstieges zum Sinn des Seins (ibid. 1950).