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EDITH STEIN
Potency and Act
Translated by Walter Redmond
Potency and Act is
the second of three works in which Edith Stein said she endeavored to fulfill
her “proper mission’ in philosophy, her “life’s task”: relating the
phenomenology of her teacher Edmund Husserl and the scholasticism of St. Thomas
Aquinas. But more than “critically comparing” the two ways of thinking, she
wished to “fuse” them into her own “philosophical system,” searching for
that perennial philosophy lying “beyond ages and peoples, common to all who
honestly seek truth.”
ISBN 978-0-935216-48-6
ICS Code: PAA
576 pages, paper, $19.95
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More Information
Edith Stein was a Jewish phenomenologist who became a
Catholic after reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Jesus and
entered the order of Discalced Carmelites founded by the saint. Stein died in
Auschwitz in 1942 and was herself canonized in 1998 as St. Teresa Benedicta of
the Cross.
Her philosophical thinking had been formed by Husserl, but she came to “find
a home in Aquinas’s thought world.” In Potency and Act she “aimed
to get from scholasticism to phenomenology and vice versa” and “allow the
two ways of doing philosophy to come to resolution within herself.”
The first of the three works in which she carried out her mission was a play
where Husserl and Aquinas appear on stage to discuss their agreements and
differences (in Knowledge and Faith, ICS Publications, Edith Stein’s
Collected Works, vol. 8). The second, Potency and Act, was written in
1931 but published for the first time in 1998. The third was her major work, Finite
and Eternal Being, written around 1935 and also published posthumously, in
1950 (Collected Works, vol. 9).
Potency and Act is complementary to Finite and Eternal Being, for
they are quite different in content. The approach to the study of being in Potency
and Act is “modal” as the title implies; her treatment of possible
worlds and of form prescribing possibilities relates to phenomenological themes
and also to recent developments in logical semantics.
Philosophy of religion, of course, is a central concern. We reach God not
only through faith and contemplation, she says, but “by thinking,” using “logical
reasoning” both from the world without (as in St. Thomas) and from the world
within (“the way of St. Augustine”); indeed, God’s existence is also a “purely
formal conclusion.”
Her many searching analyses are suggestive in their own right: on human
freedom, temporality, self-knowledge, individuality, evolution (which she “fits
into the “scholastic world view”), atheism, eschatology.
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