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Waltraut Stein, Edith Stein’s great-niece, played a key role in presenting The Problem of Empathy. She shared personal insights, organised Edith’s notes, and made complex ideas on understanding others clear, showing empathy as both an intellectual and deeply human practice.

In her foreword, Edith Stein explains how she studied empathy by reviewing past approaches, separating aesthetic, cognitive, and ethical perspectives. Stein also identified the core issue as understanding empathy as perceiving others’ experiences. Acknowledging Husserl’s influence, she emphasises her own careful analysis and aims to clarify the central question, providing a foundation for future research.

Edith Stein’s Problem of Empathy explores how we understand others. She clarifies confusion in empathy theory, examines experiences through phenomenology, and shows empathy as a unique, direct way of grasping another person’s feelings.