Edith had been seeking truth for many years. Even in her teens she was a searcher after knowledge. When she began the studies that she thought would qualify her as a teacher, she turned to psychology as offering, she thought, genuine knowledge of the human condition. The experimental and rationalist psychology she found in the University of Breslau disappointed her. Then she came upon the Logical investigations of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, which he had published in 1900. When he wrote, German philosophy had largely lost its way: the giants of the early 19th century were gone, and philosophy had to an extent given up the cause of reaching meaningful truth. Husserl was rooted in experience, in consciousness, and he raised the hope that empiricism, scepticism and relativism do not have the last despairing word.
Embracing phenomenology
Husserl's disciples accepted their master's claim that phenomenology offered an ultimate philosophical foundation for growing sciences like psychology and mathematics, and they would no longer be vulnerable to the prevailing climate of relativism and scepticism. Edith Stein was enthralled and embraced phenomenology as a way of satisfying her desire to pursue the promised path of seeking the truth. She appropriated Husserl's rigorous scientific method of analysing the data of consciousness and began applying it to other areas of experience, which Husserl had not yet managed to select for scrutiny. Thus she selected for her doctoral thesis the issue of empathy. This choice was quite significant as empathy (Einfülung) relates more to feeling than cognition or knowing and is already an indication of her concern for a philosophy embracing the full human person. It is also a step in her own personal search for a meaning of her own life. In time, as we shall see, this search led her to Catholicism. But she was never to abandon her phenomenology, and she engaged profoundly with these skills in the study of the Trinity, the Cross, the mind of St Thomas Aquinas, and finally St John of the Cross
*What? Impossible!!!! The schism says nothing good can come from that stuff.