Thine Own Self: Individuality in Edith Stein's Later Writings

Edith Stein was one of the important early phenomenologists. A German-Jewish philosopher, Discalced Carmelite nun, martyr, and saint who died in Auschwitz, Stein participated in the early 20th century revival of scholasticism and was much admired by John Paul II. Thine Own Self focuses on Stein's later writings and in particular her magnum opus, Finite and Eternal Being. Although completed in 1936, Stein's book was not published at the time because of the new laws against non-Aryan publications, and the work sat completed but unread until after World War II. The recent availability of this book in English makes a substantive scholarly analysis of this major text particularly timely.

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. Borden Sharkey explains how Stein's theory of individuality and individual forms is tied to her understanding of essence and being, and she compares Stein's distinctive metaphysical positions to those of Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and Edmund Husserl.

In addition to expositing Stein's metaphysical positions, Borden Sharkey argues that, although Stein's account of individual forms is both more contemporary and more adequate than John Duns Scotus's haecceitas, it is nonetheless problematic. The book concludes by defending a more Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of form―albeit one that must be rearticulated in light of contemporary and Steinian critiques.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sarah Borden Sharkey, associate professor of philosophy at Wheaton College, is author of Edith Stein in the series Outstanding Christian Thinkers.