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Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being
Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 11
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. She wished to fuse both into her own philosophical system, searching for that [perennial philosophy lying ‘beyond ages and peoples, common to all who earnestly seek truth.

“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 1042 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 phenomenonolgy and vice versa’ and ‘allow the two ways of doing philosophy to come to resolution within herself.”  [From cover]

ICS, 584 pages, 19.95