Many interested reader will have put aside a work by Edith Stein due to its seeming inaccessibility, with the awareness that there was something important there for a future occasion. This collection of essays attempts to provide an idea of what this important something might be and give a key to the reading of Stein’s various works. It is divided into two parts reflecting Stein’s development. The first part, «Phenomenology», deals with those features of Stein’s work that set it apart (...) from that of other phenomenologists, notably Husserl. The second part is entitled «Metaphysics», although Stein the phenomenologist would, like Husserl, initially have shied away from this designation. However, as Stein gradually understood the importance of the Christian faith for completing the phenomenological project of founding the sciences, and accepted it as indispensable for a philosophical view of the whole, her «attempt at an ascent to the meaning of being» can legitimately be called metaphysics, even as it also constitutes a fundamental criticism of Aristotle and Aquinas. (shrink)

Edith Stein (1891-1942), a philosopher, an author and a Catholic feminist wrote on spirituality and philosophical writings which hold spiritual treasures and mystery of Christianity while others are more directly related to the humanity, hermeneutics, philosophical anthropology and Christian vocation, sensation and inner events such as theological anthropology.

Fließende Identität ist zum Wunschtraum einer ‚androgyn-multiplen‘ Kultur geworden. Utopien im Sinne des totalen Selbstentwurfs verwischen bisherigen Grenzen zwischen Fleisch und Plastik, Körper und Computer. Im postmodernen Plural gilt das Subjekt nur als Momentaufnahme im Fluss weiterer Verwandlungen. Es bedarf mehr denn je eines sinnvollen Durchdenkens: Was ist der Mensch? Edith Steins Denken legt frei, dass es eine Entfaltung gibt vom Unbelebten zum Belebten, über Pflanze und Tier bis zu jenem Wesen, das über Freiheit und Selbstbewusstsein verfügt: dem Menschen. Und (...) zugleich gelangt er aus sich selbst in einem Überstieg, ja, in eine lösende Beziehung: ‚In der Vereinigung mit der Göttlichen Liebe umfasst der geschaffene Geist auch erkennend, selig und frei bejahend sich selbst.‘ Das ist die Identität, um die es dem Menschen in seiner Sinnsuche geht. (shrink)

The practice of informed consent in biomedicine is so widely spread that it must be considered the most important principle within bioethics, and the most universally appealed to within recent legislation. There seems to be a consensus as to its value in research on autonomous persons, but also a problem concerning its application when dealing with people having a serious mental, social or even physical disability. Within the field of artificial procreation there are even more problems. Informed written consent is (...) often demanded from anonymous donors of gametes in order to ensure their consent to the legal and moral consequences of their anonymity. The child resulting from the artificial procreation, on the contrary, cannot consent to, nor be informed before being conceived, of the secrecy laid on the identity of its genetic parents. Some countries resolve this problem by allowing the children, when they reach their majority, to obtain some information pertaining to the health or the identity of their genetic parents. This presents ethical problems. It can be argued that the anonymity of the parents chiefly affects the children, so that an agreement on this point among parents, doctors and others must be regarded as invalid. The paper will argue that a law ensuring the complete anonymity of the parents is disregarding the informed consent and the interests of the children resulting from artificial procreation, and is thus doing more damage to society than good. (shrink)

The practice of informed consent in biomedicine is so widely spread that it must be considered the most important principle within bioethics, and the most universally appealed to within recent legislation. There seems to be a consensus as to its value in research on autonomous persons, but also a problem concerning its application when dealing with people having a serious mental, social or even physical disability.Within the field of artificial procreation there are even more problems. Informed written consent is often (...) demanded from anonymous donors of gametes in order to ensure their consent to the legal and moral consequences of their anonymity. The child resulting from the artificial procreation, on the contrary, cannot consent to, nor be informed before being conceived, of the secrecy laid on the identity of its genetic parents. Some countries resolve this problem by allowing the children, when they reach their majority, to obtain some information pertaining to the health or the identity of their genetic parents.This presents ethical problems. It can be argued that the anonymity of the parents chiefly affects the children, so that an agreement on this point among parents, doctors and others must be regarded as invalid. The paper will argue that a law ensuring the complete anonymity of the parents is disregarding the informed consent and the interests of the children resulting from artificial procreation, and is thus doing more damage to society than good. (shrink)

Because the image we have of the human person determines educational practice, Stein’s philosophy of education consists in anthropology. Her main work in education theory falls into two parts, philosophical and theological, as both disciplines influence our image of the human person. The Structure of the Human Person, the first and philosophical part of this foundational project, constitutes Stein’s mature philosophy of the human person – a subject that had occupied her all her life. This article examines the philosophical anthropology (...) of this work, its historical background and its place within Stein’s entire work. (shrink)

After her baptism at the age of 32, Stein engaged with Aquinas on several levels. Initially she compared his thought with that of Husserl, then proceeded to translate several of his works, and attempted to explore some of his fundamental concepts (potency and act) phenomenologically. She arrived finally in Finite and Eternal Being at a philosophical position inspired by his synthesis of Christian faith and philosophical tradition without abandoning her phenomenological starting point and method. Whether one would want to call (...) this position Thomist depends on what one understands Thomism to be. (shrink)

This volume brings together revised versions of papers presented at the inaugural conference of the International Association for the Study of the Philosophy of Edith Stein (IASPES). The conference papers are supplemented by a number of specially commissioned essays in order to provide a representative sample of the best research currently being carried out on Stein’s philosophy in the English speaking world. The first part of the volume centres on Stein’s phenomenology; the second part looks at her Christian philosophy; and (...) the third part explores the contexts of her philosophical work. (shrink)

Stein’s phenomenology is one that is particularly sensitive to intersubjective constitution, and thus her constitutional analysis of the body is one that allows for an analysis of the body as ‘socially constructed’ (in so far as one understands this term to mean the same as ‘inter-subjectively constituted’). The purpose of this paper is to give an account of Stein’s phenomenology of the body as it appears in On the Problem of Empathy, her constitutional analysis being explicitly articulated in this work (...) as including both subjective and intersubjective layers. (shrink)

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason plays an important role for Stein’s understanding of phenomenology. It exemplifies for her an idealist position espoused by the later Husserl but denounced by Stein as a metaphysical conviction. Nevertheless, in her discussions of the philosophy of the natural sciences she returns many times to Kant to address the nature and experience of causality, and the status of the categories and space. She follows Reinach’s criticism of Kant for subjectivizing the a priori and argues that (...) phenomenology is the way to liberate Kantianism from its uncritical elements. This chapter argues that her engagement with Kant occasions a clarification of her own metaphysical position as closer to that of Plato than that of Aristotle. (shrink)

This article explores the history of the prayer Deus qui humanae substantiae dignitatem as a contribution to the conceptualization history of human dignity. It is argued that the prayer can be traced back to pre-Carolingian times, that it forms part of an early tradition of reflection on human dignity, and that it was adapted to use at the offertory, such that an association was made between human dignity and the holy exchange of gifts. In this way, the prayer significantly shaped (...) the Christian concept of human dignity as the holy ‘place’ of commerce with God. (shrink)

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Nanay provides an original and interesting discussion of the connections between aesthetics and the philosophy of perception. According to Nanay, many topics within aesthetics are about experiences of various kinds. Aesthetics is not philosophy of perception, but there are important questions within aesthetics that we can address in an interesting way (...) by using the conceptual apparatus of the philosophy of perception.The main theme of this book is the role of attention in those perceptual experiences that are relevant for aesthetics. Nanay claims that in some paradigmatic examples of aesthetic experiences our attention is exercised in the way of being distributed across properties. He argues that various versions of distributed attention can explain our experiences of aesthetic... (shrink)

While it is generally agreed that companies need to manage their relationships with their stakeholders, the way in which they choose to do so varies considerably. In this paper, it is argued that when companies want to communicate with stakeholders about their CSR initiatives, they need to involve those stakeholders in a two-way communication process, defined as an ongoing iterative sense-giving and sense-making process. The paper also argues that companies need to communicate through carefully crafted and increasingly sophisticated processes. Three (...) CSR communication strategies are developed. Based on empirical illustrations and prior research, the authors argue that managers need to move from ‘informing’ and ‘responding’ to ‘involving’ stakeholders in CSR communication itself. They conclude that managers need to expand the role of stakeholders in corporate CSR communication processes if they want to improve their efforts to build legitimacy, a positive reputation and lasting stakeholder relationships. (shrink)

This article presents a case study of a facilitator-lead “shared reading” group with participants suffering from mental health problems. We argue that the text is the most important agent in creating a reading experience which is both subjective and shared. And we point to relatedness as a function of text agency, and to the role of facilitation in creating text-reader relations. The article also presents a new methodological framework combining physiological data of heart rate variability and linguistic, observational and subjective (...) data. By integrating these distinct data points in our analysis we demonstrate the ways in which the text functions as an agent driving processes of individuation and synchronization respectively. On the basis of linguistic analysis of readers’ responses and interactions we point to the cognitive process of mentalization underlying both individual readings and collective meaning making. At the end we discuss the relation of mentalization to diagnosis and argue that “shared reading” may function as an intervention form with a potential for modifying way of thinking; knowing when to read into and when not, and mode of thought; shifting from explanation to experience. (shrink)

Introduction O DY ss E us , one of the earliest and best-known strategists in the history of literature, chances upon the cave of the dim-witted giant ...

While it is generally agreed that companies need to manage their relationships with their stakeholders, the way in which they choose to do so varies considerably. In this paper, it is argued that when companies want to communicate with stakeholders about their CSR initiatives, they need to involve those stakeholders in a two-way communication process, defined as an ongoing iterative sense-giving and sense-making process. The paper also argues that companies need to communicate through carefully crafted and increasingly sophisticated processes. Three (...) CSR communication strategies are developed. Based on empirical illustrations and prior research, the authors argue that managers need to move from ‘informing’ and ‘responding’ to ‘involving’ stakeholders in CSR communication itself. They conclude that managers need to expand the role of stakeholders in corporate CSR communication processes if they want to improve their efforts to build legitimacy, a positive reputation and lasting stakeholder relationships. (shrink)

This is a biological approach to the philosophy of mind that feeds an investigation of the phenomena of “social” and “emotional”, both of which are widespread in nature. I scrutinize the non-dualistic Darwinian concept of the continuity of mind. For practical reasons, I address mind at different levels of organization: The systemic mind are the properties of which a common, coherent evolution works upon. Separated from this is “language-mind”: the crystallization of thought in words, which is a strictly human phenomenon. (...) As the phenomenology of the body is a theory of philosophy that lie beyond language it can—to a certain extent—be extrapolated across a species boundary. In the process the phenomenology of the body comes to resemble biosemiotics and with this tool, I investigate a field study of social play behavior in canids. This leads to a possibility to study the non-human experience of emotion as “locally meaningful phenomena”. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the collective grandness of small business is often underestimated in CSR research and policy‐making. We emphasize the importance of understanding the contexts and the ways in which small‐ and medium‐sized companies engage in CSR and how they differ from multinational companies. We suggest that it might be that researchers and practitioners are asking the wrong questions in their ambitions to prove ‘the business case for CSR’. Perhaps we should rather focus on the ‘how’ and (...) the ‘with what impact’ questions to understand better the SME engagement in CSR. (shrink)

Bioethical research has tended to focus on theoretical discussion of the principles on which the analysis of ethical issues in biomedicine should be based. But this discussion often seems remote from biomedical practice where researchers and physicians confront ethical problems. On the other hand, published empirical research on the ethical reasoning of health care professionals offer only descriptions of how physicians and nurses actually reason ethically. The question remains whether these descriptions have any normative implications for nurses and physicians? In (...) this article, we illustrate an approach that integrates empirical research into the formulation of normative ethical principles using the moral-philosophical method of Wide Reflective Equilibrium (WRE). The research method discussed in this article was developed in connection with the project ‘Bioethics in Theory and Practice’. The purpose of this project is to investigate ethical reasoning in biomedical practice in Denmark empirically. In this article, we take the research method as our point of departure, but we exclusively discuss the theoretical framework of the method, not its empirical results. We argue that the descriptive phenomenological hermeneutical method developed by Lindseth and Norberg (2004) and Pedersen (1999) can be combined with the theory of WRE to arrive at a decision procedure and thus a foundation for the formulation of normative ethical principles. This could provide health care professionals and biomedical researchers with normative principles about how to analyse, reason and act in ethically difficult situations in their practice. We also show how to use existing bioethical principles as inspiration for interpreting the empirical findings of qualitative studies. This may help researchers design their own empirical studies in the field of ethics. (shrink)

In 2005, The International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM) developed four new ethical principles of organic agriculture to guide its future development: the principles of health, ecology, care, and fairness. The key distinctive concept of animal welfare in organic agriculture combines naturalness and human care, and can be linked meaningfully with these principles. In practice, a number of challenges are connected with making organic livestock systems work. These challenges are particularly dominant in immature agro-ecological systems, for example those that (...) are characterized by industrialization and monoculture. Some of the current challenges are partly created by shortages of land and manure, which encourage zero-grazing and other confined systems. Other challenges are created in part by the conditions for farming and the way in which global food distribution systems are organized, e.g., how live animals are transported, how feed is traded and transported all over the globe, and the development of infrastructure and large herds. We find that the overall organic principles should be included when formulating guidelines for practical organic animal farming. This article explores how the special organic conceptions of animal welfare are related to the overall principles of organic agriculture. The aim is to identify potential routes for future development of organic livestock systems in different contexts and with reference to the specific understanding of animal welfare in organic agriculture. We include two contrasting cases represented by organic livestock systems in northwestern Europe and farming systems in tropical low-income countries; we use these cases to explore the widely different challenges of organic livestock systems in different parts of the world. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the collective grandness of small business is often underestimated in CSR research and policy-making. We emphasize the importance of understanding the contexts and the ways in which small- and medium-sized companies engage in CSR and how they differ from multinational companies. We suggest that it might be that researchers and practitioners are asking the wrong questions in their ambitions to prove 'the business case for CSR'. Perhaps we should rather focus on the 'how' and (...) the 'with what impact' questions to understand better the SME engagement in CSR. (shrink)

Only a few studies explore the lifeworld of the spouses of persons affected by early-onset Alzheimer disease. The aim of this study is to explore the lifeworld of spouses when their partners are diagnosed with AD, focusing on spouses’ lived experience. The study employs an interpretative phenomenological framework. Ten in-depth interviews are performed. The results show that spouses’ lifeworld changes with the diagnosis. They experience an imprisoned existence in which added obligations, fear, and worry keep them trapped at home, both (...) physically and mentally. In their longing for freedom, new strategies and attitudes helps the spouses to create an extended “lived space” with their partner. The findings stress the importance of paying attention to the lifeworld of spouses and making clinical recommendations on this basis. Most importantly, the lifeworld perspective has implications for how we understand what care is. We hope to challenge all different healthcare professionals and invite them to discuss the deep meaning of care and the definition of being professional in encounters with vulnerable others from a lifeworld perspective. (shrink)