The article examines why Edith Stein, after her early doctoral work on empathy, stopped using the term in her later philosophy. It argues that the concept of 'empathy' became too narrow for what Stein wanted to describe. Following her conversion to Christianity, Stein expanded her understanding of personhood and social relations, integrating them with the experience of a loving God. The author shows how Stein's early ideas on empathy, otherness, and personhood reach their full development in her later writings, where the encounter with otherness and the unfolding of the person are inseparable from divine love.
Edith Stein, in her work Finite and Eternal Being, argues that faith can be a legitimate source of knowledge, expanding the scope of rationality beyond what philosophy alone offers. Using the phenomenological first-person perspective and concepts of intention and fulfillment, she describes different ways of knowing God, culminating in lived mystical experience. Stein proposes a common epistemological ground where both believers and non-believers can engage, suggesting that theology and philosophy, while distinct, can enrich each other. This anticipates the work of later 'new phenomenologists' like Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion.