Showing posts sorted by date for query Max Scheler. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query Max Scheler. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Friday, August 19, 2016

Wojtyla y Amistades



Differing definitions of friendship: “people who hang out together”, “people who just get along”, “share each other’s interests”, etc.  Rather than friendship, I would classify these explanations under what Karol Wojtyla called in Love and Responsibility: “sympathy”[1].  Sympathy certainly has a place in many relationships, but it is not true friendship.

Wojtyla draws his definition of friendship unmistakably from St. Thomas Aquinas[2]. While sympathy plays an initial and later supplemental role in fostering friendship, it is ultimately the will according to Wojtyla and Aquinas which sustains friendship.  Even more specifically, the will as gifted with hope in turn provides for true friendship.  Placed in sequence then, ideal friendship between persons runs this course:

Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills → Virtue of Hope   

Far too often today, “friendship” remains on the sentimental and sympathetic level.  And unfortunately, Wojtyla indicates in romantic relationships especially, “As soon as sympathy breaks down they often feel that love too has come to an end”[3].  Yet, the other danger, in which Wojtyla seems to differ from Aquinas, is that when friendship grows cold it must be supplemented by sympathy[4].  As in the case with marriage, a “union of wills” does not necessarily provide for a successfully long-term relationship.  Likewise, Daniel Schwartz notes about Aquinas’ view of friendship that the virtue of hope must be active in addition to “conformity of wills”[5].      

The necessity of sympathy is a given as it fosters many relationships anyway, strictly based on “subjective intensity”[6] of encounter with another.  Hope, on the other hand, does not reveal itself as necessary until the temptation towards distrust begins to creep into relationships.  That is to say,

uncertainty about what a friend or potential friend wants and desires can be an obstacle to friendship. And the same goes for certain sorts of uncertainty about what a friend will want and desire in the future. In chapter five Schwartz discusses, first, Aquinas's view that we should presume good of others, unless there be evidence to the contrary, and hence that we should presume that people mean what they say, other things being equal and unless there be evidence to the contrary. (Schwartz calls this a ‘presumption of authenticity’.) Second, Schwartz tries to show how hope, for Aquinas, can be an aid to friendship, by being a cause of friendship, by sustaining friendship, and by warding off the ‘destructive social impact of despair’.[7]

So again, Wojtyla appears to differ from Aquinas in this respect by supplying sympathy as a ‘cause’ of friendship while Aquinas supplies ‘hope’.  But as I have indicated elsewhere, St. Thomas Aquinas does not exclude emotions from the dynamism of love as many suppose he does!  Rather, Aquinas’ proposal of hope as crucial to sustaining friendship includes the emotions and sympathy just as Wojtyla would not exclude the virtue of hope either.  The following sequence continues to apply to both Wojtyla and Aquinas’ view, though I would note a supplement of sympathy moreso in Wojtyla’s approach:

 Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills (& Sympathy) → Virtue of Hope (& Sympathy)

This sequence would readily agree with Pope Francis’ more recent insistence on the necessity of tenderness in relationships, or more aptly named “mercy” which Aquinas deemed as God’s most potent attribute! 

 

[1] Wojtyla, Karol. Love and Responsibility.  “From Sympathy to Friendship” 88-94ff Ignatius: San Francisco, 1981.

[2] Aquinas’ own definition surprisingly differed from Aristotle’s: Justice was essential to Aquinas’ view of friendship whereas to Aristotle, ‘when men are friends they have no need of justice’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1155a 26).

[3] Ibid, 90.  See also Wojtyla’s ‘Libidinistic’ Interpretation (61).

[4] Ibid, 91.  See also Wojtyla’s ‘Rigorist’ Interpretation (57).  Pope Francis has also termed sympathy as ‘tenderness’.

[5] Daniel Schwartz, Aquinas on Friendship, Oxford University Press, 2007, 189pp.,

[6] Wojtyla, Karol. Love and Responsibility.  “From Sympathy to Friendship” 90

[7] Michael Rota, University of St. Thomas reviews: Daniel Schwartz, Aquinas on Friendship, Oxford University Press, 2007, 189pp.

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Although originally 2 different posts I have combined these under common theme


A group of friends drawn initially together by the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, included: Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Hedwig Martius, and Roman Ingarden. There were many more great minds in the following of Husserl (including Heidegger and Von Hildebrand) but I find the relationships of these four significant on the feast of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross because of the effect that they had on the person of Edith Stein and her legacy.

Max Scheler, for his part, is credited by lecturer Benjamin Gibbs as having empowered Stein “to take religious ideas and attitudes seriously for the first time since her adolescence”[1] In Stein's own words, Max Scheler had almost mythic status:

One’s first impression of Scheler was fascination. I have never encountered the phenomenon of genius so clearly in any other person. His large blue eyes seemed to radiate the light of amore exalted world. His features were handsome and noble; yet life had left some devastating traces in his face.[2]

It's interesting to note, that Husserl and Scheler authored philosophical works which provided an alternative to 'psychologism' or the scientific pretentions of psychology.[3] Since Freud's work would have been popularly widespread in their day, I can only guess as to why they would be formulating a much more sound phenomenology than the be-all/end-all discipline of psychoanalysis.  I have written elsewhere of Scheler’s refutation of psychology and was unaware that this was also one of Husserl’s tenants of Phenomenology.  Indeed, Gibbs notes that this point was one of the first things that drew Stein to Husserl.  Gibbs notes, “Edith studied psychology at Breslau University for four semesters. By then she had become discontented with psychology’s lack of a scientific basis”[4] What is meant by “science” here is simply an ordered, logical basis in accord with reality.  Something she found much more apparent in Husserl’s Logical Investigations.

Besides Scheler, Stein found lifelong friends in Hedwig Martius (later Conrad-Martius), Roman Ingarden and Adolf Reinach (and his wife Anne).  Though Hedwig decided to convert to Lutheranism, it was in her family library that Edith found the Life of St. Teresa of Avila.  Famously, though the exact details are lacking, Edith’s own words relate:

For twelve years Carmel had been my goal, since the summer of 1921 when the Life of our holy mother Teresa came into my hands and put an end to my long search for the true faith.[5]

Her friend Roman Ingarden, a Polish philosopher from Krakow, would later become a teacher of Karol Wojtyla.  The two friends corresponded about numerous topics, both philosophical and personal.  Gibbs notes that both Ingarden and another professor named Hans Lipps may have been romantic interests for Stein,

According to Hedwig Conrad-Martius – Edith’s philosophical colleague and friend Hans Lipps. But her love for him was not reciprocated; at least, it was evident that Lipps didn’t want to marry her. Another object of Edith’s affections may have been Roman Ingarden, to whom she wrote over 150 letters, mostly reporting the details of her work with Husserl. In one letter Edith addressed Ingarden as ‘Mein Liebling’ – ‘my dear’.  But he returned to Poland early in 1918 and married a school doctor the following year. Edith wrote congratulating him on his marriage, and asked him to burn any personal letters from her that he might have kept.[6]

Roman Ingarden would have been the teacher to relay Max Scheler to the young Karol Wojtyla in Poland.  Gibbs notes, “The future Pope wrote his Habilitationsschrift on the ethical theory of Max Scheler”.  Through Ingarden as well, Wojtyla must have been introduced to the person and though of Stein.  He too would later canonize her as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. 

It’s fascinating to trace how the friendships that arose from the initial followers of Husserl made a tremendous impact on history, even to the degree that Karol Wojtyla would adopt much of the thought of the Phenomenologists.  However, a sad note is the subsequent break of Husserl with his students as he distanced himself especially from Stein on account of her being an ambitious woman in a “male profession”.  His own thought became more and more disjointed, whereas his students carried the integrity of the Göttingen school far beyond his reach. 

Benjamin Gibbs study of Edith Steins life, to which I refer often here, does not claim to cover the entirety of her story and makes no mention of her sister Rose’s journey to Carmel with her.  What he intended to do was to collect previously untranslated German letters of Stein, as well as include her unfinished Autobiography, Life in a Jewish Family, as major sources in the corpus of Stein’s life (because only the popular but imprecise memoir of Teresa Benedicta as written by Sr Teresia Renata Posselt was available as yet).  He does well to fill and blanks in her life, and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the network of philosophers who influenced her ultimately toward Catholicism. 

A final note regarding Stein's "friendship" with Husserl.  It lacked "sympathy", even though Stein herself attempted to reconcile "empathy" with Husserl's discipline in her own painstaking work on the subject.  Their relationship only reflected the "conformity of wills" aspect of the following sequence (although the conformity of Husserl's will is questionable):

Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills → Virtue of Hope  

Indeed she often refers to him as "the master", which unfortunately reveals a master/slave dynamic at work, especially since he would not allow her to become his peer professionally and kept her at the level of secretary.

On the other hand, her longstanding friendships e.g. Roman Ingarden did reflect this sequence:

Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills (& Sympathy) → Virtue of Hope (& Sympathy),

and she found that they too disagreed with Husserl.  Her work with empathy turned out to be the last scholarly chance for Husserl to change his thinking, and unfortunately he did not.

 

 

[1] Gibbs, Benjamin. ‘My long search for the true faith’: The Conversion of Edith Stein. www.carmelite.org/documents/Heritage/gibbsconversionofstein.pdf, May 2012 p.12. It's important to note also that Gibbs mentions often how Stein was not an atheistic philosopher in principle, she merely 'stopped praying' at one point in her young life, and she did not begin again until interacting with brilliant philosophers in Gottingen, Germany.

[2] Stein, Edith. Life in a Jewish Family, An Autobiography. translated by Josephine Koeppel, OCD. http://www.sistersofcarmel.com/edith-stein-life-in-a-jewish-family/ 1933­

[3] Gibbs, Benjamin. ‘My long search for the true faith’: The Conversion of Edith Stein. www.carmelite.org/documents/Heritage/gibbsconversionofstein.pdf, May 2012 p.7. “For Edith, the attractive features of Husserl’s phenomenology were:(1) Husserl’s repudiation of the scientific pretensions of psychology, and of ‘psychologism’ -

the error of conflating the formal sciences of logic and pure mathematics with the empiricalmethods of psychology.”  Psychologism is essentially the belief that psychology can explain all phenomena.

 

[4] Gibbs, Benjamin. ‘My long search for the true faith’: The Conversion of Edith Stein. P.6  Edith herself says, All my study of psychology had persuaded me that this science [phenomenology] was in its infancy; it still lacked clear basic concepts; furthermore, there was no one who could establish such an essential foundation. On the other hand, what I had learned about phenomenology so far fascinated me tremendously, because it consisted precisely of such a labour of clarification and because, here, one forged one’s own mental tools for the task at hand. (LJF 222)

[5] in die Hände gefallen war’. The translation in Posselt (2005) renders the German incorrectly as ‘had happened to fall into my hands’, thus appearing to support Posselt’s claim that Edith came across the book by chance. (ESGA I, 350; cf. Posselt 118).

[6] Gibbs: Letter of 1948 to Fr John Oesterreicher, in Never Forget, ed. W. Herbstrith (ICS 1998), 266.
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Final Installment: 12/29/16


Wojtyla and Tymieniecka’s friendship


I was unaware of a 30+ year relationship between Karol Wojtyla and the Polish-American philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka: a student of Roman Ingarden, a first-hand Polish follower of Husserl as I expressed in my post, “Wojtyla y Amistades”.  She is the founder and former president of the World Phenomenology Institute , and a translator of Wojtyla’s own Acting Person.  Her entrepreneurial spirit garnered the support of not only her former teacher, Roman Ingarden, but also a crucial contributor to the Theology of the Body: Paul Ricoeur.

The Institute’s founding president and principal intellectual guide for more than three decades was the European philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a student of Roman Ingarden and close associate of Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur.  Ingarden, Levinas, and Ricoeur joined together with other well-known philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Stephan Strasser in supporting and advancing the Institute’s programs and publications during its early years and ever after.  It is but one measure of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s personal accomplishment that she was  able to attract and engage the very best philosophical minds of our time in the Institute’s programs and publications, in large part as a direct consequence of her own reputation and philosophical achievements.

Tymieniecka was married to Hendrik Houthakker, an economics professor in the United States, and together the couple hosted Wojtyla in 1978.  She became good friends with the Pope in 1973, while he was Cardinal of Krakow, and they remained “pen-pals” of sorts until his death in 2005.  She passed away in 2014, leaving the World Phenomenology Institute in the hands of:

Dr. William S. Smith, Executive President, and to Co-Presidents, Dr. Jadwiga S. Smith and Dr. Daniela Verducci.  These three have been involved with the Institute for nearly thirty years, and Dr. Tymieniecka entrusted the future of her life-long work to these three individuals.  Dr. Jadwiga Smith will organize conferences and programs on the American front, while Dr. Verducci will continue her excellent work in Europe and beyond.  Together these three talented organizers and scholars will continue the work of the WPI.   They very much look forward to working with a newly constituted Editorial Board of peer reviewers, who will continue the high-quality  of scholarship for the WPI’s three major publication, Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, Phenomenological Inquiry: A Review of Philosophical Ideas and Trends, and Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology in Dialogue.




 

Friday, January 8, 2016

Max Scheler, Aristotle and JPII

Fr. Wojciech Giertych, O.P., a Thomist, explains my points in this post much more succinctly than I could.  Here's a quote of his that sums up my thoughts below: "The methodical presentation of the moral ethos that Aquinas gave was suspended upon the basic structures of human psychology."  I strongly recommend listening to his lecture on Virtue here before reading the rest.
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In 1954 Wojtyla became professor of ethics at the University of Lublin in Poland.  His courses centered around St. Thomas Aquinas and Max Scheler, with much attention also given to Kant (in particular his personalistic norm).  Seeing as how Scheler was such an influence on JPII, here then is my assessment of Scheler in relation to Aristotle:

The fundamental concepts[1] of Max Scheler’s noölogical method are: “World of work” (Arbeitswelt) and “form of spiritual life” (Geistige Lebensform).

 If I were to re-state the above summary about Scheler’s work Die transcendbntale und die psychologische Methode, I would use the Benedictine “Ora et Labora” which may serve as a more familiar definition (λόγος)[2] of Scheler’s German verbiage.  Max Scheler’s use of “Lebensform”—literally “form of life”, closely equates to Aristotle’s εἶδος (or character formation) and St. Benedict’s Regula (or rule of life).  That is to say, Max Scheler observed two major influences on the human person: “work” and “form of life”.  Of these, I am most interested in the latter as it concerns the character (εἶδος) of unique persons.  However, interestingly enough, his identification of “work” closely aligns with Aristotle’s ἔργον and St. Benedict’s “labora”.

The reason why I refer to Regula Sancti Benedicti and Aristotle, is to provide a historical framework for Scheler’s modern attempt to synthesize philosophy and psychology in Die transcendbntale und die psychologische Methode.  After all, Scheler divides his work into three parts[3]: the first being the historical survey of philosophic method, the second devoted to Arbeitswelt, and the third to Geistige Lebensform (as opposed to mere psychological method).  As I have said, of these three, I want to focus most on the third in order to provide a reason/definition for why formation is necessary and indeed unavoidable for all human persons.  In other words, Scheler’s “form of life” occurs especially in the mind of every human person[4], whether he or she consciously participates in it or not (i.e. a conscious effort to grow in virtue {ἀρετή}).  I am not going to go into the extensive subjective questions Scheler raises with psychology or the interiority of the human person per se.  Instead, I simply intend to argue for a noölogical defense of the formation of the human person.

To simplify, it is often said of a unique and impressive person, “He or she is quite a character!”.  Such a reference is not to be confused with “caricature”, as in a larger-than-life or play-acting personality.  Rather, the use of the word character, or “building character” is in reference to the “form of life” that a person has undergone.  Aristotle understands this to be the result of the practice/function (ἔργον) of virtue (ἀρετή) or the lack thereof, i.e. virtue is either understood in human beings to be potential or actual and the fully formed human being has virtue actually[5].  Therefore, I am arguing that we recognize either a potentiality or an actuality of virtue in persons as “character building or formation”.  St. Benedict’s “Ora et Labora” adds a theological component somewhat lacking in Aristotle, and Scheler’s critique of the contemporary psychological method would agree with St. Benedict based on the following:

Scheler condemns the psychological method of starting from definite and original data such as ‘here and now given feelings’ as a pure fiction, and charges the method with confusing mere psychic existence with living Spirit as expressed in the concrete relations of society, in law, religion, etc., at any stage of culture[6].

In other words, Max Scheler converted to Catholicism in large part because he recognized the Geistige Lebensform he desired in the religion.  That is, his own decision making was based on his noölogical method as divided into his understanding and assessment of the historical, Arbeitswelt, and Geistige Lebensform.

John Paul II found in Scheler a suitable complement to Aquinas for developing much of his own philosophical thought.  Aquinas, of course, drew largely from Aristotle--which explains why I referred to him most often in the above.  When adding the virtues of faith, hope, and love to Aristotle’s more natural assessment, it is easy to begin to see the potential in the study of individuals’ own virtues inter-subjectively.  In other words, each person can gain a degree of understanding of the level of virtue that he or she has attained with self-knowledge.  Likewise, a person can determine how deficient a virtue is in his or her life, even in relation to God.  I have JPII and his predecessors to thank for such understanding.   




[1] Die transcendbntale und die psychologische Methode: Eine grundsützliche Erürterung zur philosophischen Methodik. Von Dr. Max F. Scheler. Leip zig : Verlag der Dürr'schen Buchhandlung. 1900. Pages, 178.The Monist, Vol. 12, No. 4 (July, 1902), pp. 633-634 Published by: Oxford University Press
[2] "In Aristotle’s view the thing defined by a definition of x is the FORM of x. Hence ‘the logos of x’ is often equivalent to ‘the form of x’."  All references to Aristotle taken from Terence Irwin and Gail Fine.  Nicomachean Ethics and Glossary.  Hackett Publishing: Cambridge 1995.
[3] W. B. Lane: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 10, No. 5 (Sep., 1901), pp. 568-570. Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
[4]Verlag der Dürr'schen Buchhandlung.  “Mind, and therefore also its constituent ‘intellect,’ is at the beginning of the quest for its contents a perfectly problematic conception.”
[5] Terence Irwin and Gail Fine.  Nicomachean Ethics and Glossary.  Hackett Publishing: Cambridge 1995 "Form is the actuality that realizes the potentiality of the matter."
[6] W. B. Lane: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 10, No. 5 (Sep., 1901), pp. 568-570. Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
 

Friday, January 3, 2014

JPII, Edith Stein, and Martin Heidegger

 Edith Stein

Germany and Poland gave witness to some outstanding intellectuals in the 20th century. Of these, Joseph Ratzinger has most recently left, and will continue to leave, his mark on the world as Pope Benedict Emeritus. Likewise, I look at his older German “siblings” with even greater wonder as they rank with the likes of Dietrich Von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl, to name a few.

Edith Stein, in particular, canonized by JPII as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross in 1998, bridges the gap between the Munich school of phenomenology (founded by Edmund Husserl in Germany), and the Lublin school of Philosophy (heavily influenced by Karol Wojtyla) in Poland. Ironically, Edith Stein was never formally a part of either “school”. She was a protégé of Husserl after the Munich School, and was executed at Auschwitz while the Lublin School was underway in Poland. Nevertheless, her contributions to what would become Personalism, from Husserl and Scheler’s phenomenology, stand out from her peers as groundbreaking work for that which she loved most: the Church.

As a non-Christian, Stein studied under Edmund Husserl from approximately 1916-1922, during which time Martin Heidegger was developing his philosophy of "Dasein" in his famous Sein und Zeit. The two, Stein and Heidegger, would take radically divergent paths in the wake of the Nazi party’s establishment of the Third Reich in Germany. They did, more or less, agree on one thing: the importance of Sein or ‘being’ in the light of the human person. The objective difference, of course, was Stein’s baptism, eventual profession of religious vows, and later execution, vs. Heidegger’s successive contributions to Nazism.

Despite Heidegger’s understanding of "Dasein", he could not help conforming to the reigning political party of his day. Even though Dasein rules out the conformity of an individual to a universal without careful deliberation, yet, such was his course of action. Perhaps like Ratzinger’s unwillingness to follow through with the Hitler youth of his day, Heidegger had unspoken reservations about Nazism, but again, the outcome of his and Ratzinger’s lives were very different. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s early work is not without merit, especially when viewed in the light of Husserl’s tutelage; and more specifically, under the lens of saints like Edith Stein, and as we will soon see, St. Augustine.

Heidegger disassociated with Husserl in a similar way to Stein, but as I said, with divergent conclusions. The only things to surface--by way of life events-- from Martin Heidegger, were lectures and writings under Nazi sponsorship. Meanwhile, Stein had much more explicit fruit from her life’s work, namely: her personal sanctification, the sanctification of others by her works, and ultimately, martyrdom for the sake of Christ.

In the end, Heidegger’s life was not without inspiration for others. Craig John Neuman De Paulo, a knight of Malta, published a study in 1998 introducing “Augustinian Phenomenology” as applied to the work of Heidegger, which looked at "Dasein" through the lens of St. Augustine. De Paulo’s work is called, Being and Conversion: A Phenomenological Ontology of Radical Restlessness, and as indicated in the previous sentence, was published the same year as Teresa Benedicta of the Cross’ canonization.

 Being and Conversion--DePaulo

Indeed, Edith Stein corresponded with a Jesuit priest and Augustinian scholar from 1925-1931[1], not long after her initial conversion experience with St. Teresa of Avila’s Autobiography. The said priest was a good friend of Edmund Husserl, Erich Przywara (1889-1972)[2], and may very well have had some undocumented influence on Heidegger as well.

In De Paulo’s Being and Conversion, a view of the human person is proposed as in a state of constant restlessness between “perversio” and “conversio”, Augustinian terms for either “turning in on oneself” or “turning to the Other”. Heidegger's "Dasein" partially describes this restlessness, which would have very nearly met with the agreement of Edith Stein’s Endliches und Ewiges Sein.

But, in her magnum opus, she refutes both Husserl and Heidegger’s failure to address the eternal significance of the human person in their phenomenology. Thus, the dynamic (between ‘perversio’ and ‘conversio’) proposed first by Augustine, and re-proposed by De Paulo, must be viewed in the light of eternity. This importance of perspective and ultimately, relationship with God, is precisely where Edith Stein departs from both Husserl and Heidegger in Endliches und Ewiges Sein, and is seen to be lived out in her own conversion to Catholicism.

The key term Stein uses in Endliches und Ewiges Sein that corresponds nicely with both Augustine and De Paulo’s dynamic is: “individuelles Wesen”[3] or “individual form/essence” as related, or reciprocal, to community. Where Heidegger chose to surround himself with the Nazi party, Stein sought friendships based on virtue and eternal significance. She entered religious life and found the solution to this constant dynamic of restlessness so characteristic of the world, “perversio and conversio”. She knew the importance of surrounding oneself with other individuals who have the same understanding of personal significance in the light of eternity.

It was at the Carmelite convent in Cologne, Germany that she completed Endliches und Ewiges Sein. Not long after, she would be hunted down for having jewish ancestry and taken to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

I can only marvel at how much more impact Edith Stein would have had on the two European schools of philosophy (Munich and Lublin), had she lived as long as Martin Heidegger, Dietrich Von Hildebrand, or even Joseph Ratzinger. Yet, we have the testimony of a life lived in truth, virtue, and oriented towards the Eternal in the midst of so many diverse men of genius who had just as much, if not more, access to the same resources. Edith Stein is a witness to the grace of God in thought, decision, and action.

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, ora pro nobis!



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[1] Sarah Sharkey. Thine Own Self: Individuality in Edith Stein’s Later Writings, 2010. Reviewed by Dermot Moran.

[2] Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis (Munich, 1932), a translation by John Betz and David Bentley Hart. *My note: Edmund Husserl is more often associated with the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas. It follows that although Stein was also influenced by Aquinas, she did not consider herself a ‘neo-Thomist’, and may have been much more acquainted with works of the Carmelites and St. Augustine.

[3] Marianne Sawicki, Ph.D. “Personal Connections: The Phenomenology of Edith Stein”. 1998, Hesburgh Library, ND.