At the University of Breslau the psychologist Georg Moskiewicz handed Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations to a young student of psychology and told her that at Göttingen, where Husserl taught, the students philosophised day and night. The student was Edith Stein, and in 1913, after two years at Breslau, she moved to Göttingen. Husserl was the founder of phenomenology, a method that sets theories about the mind aside and describes experience exactly as it is lived. The method had an obvious weak point. It begins with one person's consciousness, examined from within, and a philosophy that begins there owes an account of how it ever reaches anyone else. Stein took that question for her doctoral thesis, broke off in 1915 to nurse in an Austrian military hospital, and finished the thesis in the summer of 1916.
Her answer is the claim she is remembered for. When we see pain in someone's face, we do not work it out from our own case, and we do not catch it as we catch a mood: we see it, there, as a fact about that person. Yet we never have it as we have our own pain. Empathy, in Stein's use of the word, is the name for this experience: we meet another person's life directly, and it stays theirs. The rest of the thesis, On the Problem of Empathy, is built on that claim. A person learns what kind of being she is, and even that her body is one body among others, through the people who see her. The University of Freiburg, where Husserl now held a chair, gave the thesis its highest grade.
From October 1916 she was Husserl's assistant, transcribing and editing his manuscripts for sixteen months, until she resigned in February 1918. The next step in a German academic career was the Habilitation, the second thesis that qualifies a scholar to lecture, and it had been closed to women. Göttingen turned hers away in 1919, and Husserl's letter of recommendation gave her little support. She petitioned the Prussian ministry of education, which ruled in February 1920 that she was right in principle; her own case did not change. The work she had written was printed in 1922 as Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, which carries her analysis from two persons to the crowd and the community, and An Investigation Concerning the State followed it in 1925.
The next turn in her life came from outside philosophy. Stein had been born into a Jewish family and had long since given up praying. Accounts of her conversion to Catholicism all point to one book, the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite, which she read in the summer of 1921 at the house of the phenomenologist Hedwig Conrad-Martius in Bergzabern. She was baptised on 1 January 1922. For most of the next decade she taught at a school run by Dominican nuns in Speyer and studied Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican theologian.
Aquinas changed where her philosophy starts. As Stein read Husserl, the world is always a world for a subject, built up in that subject's acts. She criticised him for trying to secure objectivity from inside subjectivity; she wanted to begin from being itself. Her essay for his seventieth birthday in 1929, "Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison", calls his orientation egocentric and Aquinas's theocentric.
In 1932 she took a lectureship at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, and on 19 April 1933 she was dismissed because of her Jewish descent. That month she wrote to Pope Pius XI asking him to condemn the persecution of the Jews; she received no direct answer. In October she entered the Carmelite convent in Cologne. As a Carmelite she took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross and wrote Finite and Eternal Being. The book works upward from finite things to an eternal being, and it answers Martin Heidegger, Husserl's successor at Freiburg, who had described being as finite. It could not be published in Germany and appeared in 1950.
At the end of 1938 she moved to the Carmelite convent at Echt in the Netherlands. In July 1942 the Dutch bishops condemned the persecution of the Jews, and the German authorities answered by arresting Catholics of Jewish descent. Stein and her sister Rosa were taken on 2 August and killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau a week later. Pope John Paul II canonised her in 1998. It is still disputed whether she died as a martyr for her faith or was murdered as a Jew.
Philosophers now return most often to her first book. Its account of empathy is ranked with Husserl's and with that of Max Scheler, whose lectures she had heard at Göttingen, and her treatises on community are discussed in current work on how groups think and act together.