Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue

MacIntyre is one of the major British philosophers of the post-war years, and a convert to Roman Catholicism. Edith Stein was an intellectual of considerable importance in the period between the two World Wars. The fact that she was also canonised as a Saint is truly remarkable: a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism, she died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In this major study of Stein's development as a theologian and philosopher, MacIntyre reveals many of the fundamental issues in both disciplines and in their cross-fertilisation. Stein was a pupil of the phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl. She then sought in her own writing to interpret phenomenology in a Thomistic way. In this, she was as original and innovative as were the Catholic philosophers - such as Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe - who made similar interpretations of the work of Wittgenstein in this country.