Abstract

Edith Stein´s philosophical work was largely devoted to the synthesis of the phenomenological thought of her master Edmund Husserl with thomistic scholasticism. This work tries to continue the motivation of that Steinian synthesis project in relation to one of the notions dealt with in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas that may help to clarify the phenomenological analysis about imagination and image consciousness: namely the idea of virtuality. It will be argued that this notion of “virtuality” used by Thomas Aquinas can characterize the mode of being of some components of pictorial images.