Empathy, Person and Community: the Foundation of the Sciences in the Phenomenology of Edith Stein

Graduation date: 2017During the first decades of the twentieth century different attempts were made to unify the diversifying and specializing sciences. One of these attempts manifested as the History of Science. Established in 1913 with the academic journal Isis, its first article written by George Sarton clarified that the field was created to keep connected and synthesize the sciences, which had become highly stratified over the previous century. The primary concern was that scientists would lose the ability to communicate across disciplines, that the many branches would disintegrate into ever-increasing specializations, and that science itself would lose its meaning. This thesis looks at another attempt to unify the sciences that emerged at this time in Germany: phenomenology.\ud \ud Edmund Husserl created phenomenology to provide the unified foundation of the sciences. The phenomenologist who accomplished this was one of his students, Edith Stein. This thesis looks at Stein’s historical context: the intellectual influences and the European cultural crisis that conditioned phenomenology’s first decades. This thesis then examines Stein’s phenomenology and its consequences. My analysis found that as a result of her phenomenological investigation of empathy, Stein asserted the foundation of the sciences is the unfolded person