Edith Stein's empathy concept in the human person constitution process

Abstract

A fundamental notion in phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl at the turn of the 19th century to the 20th, is that of experiences and their action in the flow of consciousness, as they unify the intentional act (consciousness of an object) and its correlate (the object that is displays to consciousness). However, as he developed his thought, Husserl identified the need to articulate the notion of subjectivity with that of intersubjectivity, as a way of sustaining a common world for the subjects of perception. To do this, he resorted to the concept of empathy as a synthetic structure responsible for the unification of subjective perceptions and a condition for the existence of an intersubjective world. While emphasizing the empathic experience in the field of knowledge, his student Edith Stein expanded the discussion to the anthropological field, seeking to investigate the conditions for the possibility of empathy. In this project, we intend to analyze the thesis "On the problem of empathy", defended by Stein in 1916, seeking to understand the role she attributes to empathy in the constitution of the human person.