Customer Reviews

Knowledge and Faith (The Collected Works of Edith Stein) (Stein, Edith//the Collected Works of Edith Stein)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When someone, today, mentions Edith Stein it is very often in a religious context. This is because of her deep faith that yielded with her conversion to Christianity and, at the end with her martyrdom. (She died in a gas chamber during the Second World War.) Therefore, when we talk about Edith Stein we often forget her as a talented philosopher of a very lucid philosophical mind, which she always tried to melt with her deepest religious convictions. The book Knowledge and Faith is just one of such books that brings to us sharp insights in such philosophy-faith relationship. This is why this book starts with an inspired and intelligent dialogue between philosophy and theology ( incorporated in characters of Husserl and Aquinas) and ends with her philosophical essays that cannot be divided from her theological stands. It is very important book, not just to understand Edith Steins work but to clarify some important points between philosophy and faith.

Knowledge and Faith contains both the Catholic and secular (edited for publication) versions of Stein's comparison and combination of philosophers Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas. While these two are quite different on the surface (as the progenitors of phenomenology and Thomism, respectively), Stein manages to place them in immediate confrontation and display an amazingly keen understanding of both. This is, in some ways, not surprising since she was both a student of Husserl (who deserves the credit for actually saving much of his work) and a follower of the Catholic Church of which Thomas Aquinas is a "doctor".

There is also an essay on Pseudo-Dionysius included, but I recommend this book primarily as a must-read for those who wish to understand the intersection of Thomism and phenomenology).