Great Niece Waltrout Stein's Prologue

Waltrout Stein, the great-niece of Edith Stein, produces an English Translation and played a key role in introducing and explaining Edith Stein's Problem of Empathy (1916). Through her close family connection, she shared personal insights about Edith’s life, thoughts, and relationships, helping readers understand how her ideas were shaped by real experiences. Waltrout organized Edith’s notes and reflections, making complex philosophical ideas about understanding others clear and accessible. Her work provides a window into Edith’s mind and heart, showing how empathy is both an intellectual and deeply human practice. This prologue highlights the importance of family, memory, and careful stewardship in preserving a lasting philosophical legacy.

About Waltraut Stein

Waltraut Johanna Hedwig Stein, Edith Stein’s great-niece and translator, was affectionately known as Wally to family was born in Berlin on the 23rd March,1932. She emigrated with her family to the United States in 1937, travelling through Poland, Russia, China, and Japan before crossing the Pacific.

Waltraut earned a Master’s in Psychology from Ohio University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University. She taught philosophy and psychology at the University of Georgia and the University of West Georgia.

A passionate thinker, she loved Plato and Kant and was influenced by Fritz Perls’ Gestalt psychology, spending a year in a Gestalt commune on Vancouver Island. In later years, she enjoyed knitting, crochet, embroidery, and creating over 20 intricate cross-stitch pieces. Waltraut’s life combined intellectual curiosity, creativity, and a deep love for learning and craft.

Waltraut passed away peacefully on June 28, 2023, in Sebring, Florida, at the age of 91.

Waltraut's Translation

Waltrout is recognised not only for her linguistic and scholarly skill but also for her empathic grasp of Edith’s thought, echoing the book’s own focus on empathy.

Her introduction situates Edith’s dissertation within Husserl’s phenomenological method, explaining the phenomenological reduction, clarifying Stein’s analyses of empathy, the body, and the spiritual person, and exploring unresolved questions, such as how the non-spatial “I” relates to the spatial body.

Detailed notes highlight how carefully terms like Leib/Körper, Seele/Geist, and Erlebnis/Erfahrung were translated, showing a commitment to preserving the technical precision of phenomenological vocabulary.

A question at the heart of human life

Edith Stein began her great philosophical work by asking one of the most fundamental questions a person can ask: how do we truly know another human being? Her answer was empathy. For Stein, empathy is more than a feeling or an impression. It is a distinctive experience through which one person genuinely engages with another's lived reality. Understanding empathy, she argued, is the key to understanding the person.

The human person seen whole

Central to Stein's vision is her understanding of the human being as at once physical, psychological and spiritual. She calls this the layered self. Empathy, in her view, unites body, mind and soul in a single act of understanding. This holistic vision of the person runs through everything she wrote, and this early dissertation is where she first drew its outlines with clarity and precision.

The foundation of human community

Stein shows that empathic understanding reaches further than the relationship between two individuals. It forms the very foundation of human community. When we genuinely understand one another, we build the bonds that make society, culture and shared inquiry possible. Her insights here connect philosophy to psychology, theology and the social sciences, showing how deeply empathy shapes the way we live together.

An original thinker from the very beginning

Stein wrote this dissertation as a student of Edmund Husserl, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Yet even at this early stage, she was thinking for herself. She respectfully challenged her teacher and questioned the theories of other leading figures of her time, including Max Scheler. Scheler was so struck by her analysis that he cited it three times in a revised edition of his own work. Her intellectual independence was remarkable from the very start.

A work that shaped the wider conversation

The reach of Stein's dissertation extended well beyond her own circle. Her exploration of the living body and human experience touched on questions that the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty would later make central to his own work. Read within the history of phenomenology, this dissertation is not simply a student exercise. It is a genuine contribution to one of the most important philosophical conversations of the modern era.

Brought into English Translation

Dr. Waltraut Stein first undertook the translation as part of her own graduate studies, and later prepared a new edition for the Institute of Carmelite Studies. The translation is praised for its fidelity, clarity and the empathy with which it renders its subject. Waltraut also provides an introduction that guides readers through the philosophical background and the key ideas of each section of the text.

A guide to living the Christian life

Returning to this work thirty years after her original translation, Waltraut Stein found in it something far more than an academic text. She saw in her great-aunt's philosophical study a guide to living the Christian life fully and deeply. Edith Stein continued her scholarly work with great seriousness after her conversion to Christianity and as a Carmelite nun. In her example, Waltraut found the encouragement to use all of her own gifts in God's service.

Where faith and reason meet

For Edith Stein, faith and reason were deeply interdependent. This dissertation, written before her conversion, already carries the seeds of that conviction. Her careful philosophical analyses of human experience serve as a springboard to a deeper understanding of the nature of the person. Philosophers, psychologists, theologians and all those interested in meaningful relationships and human community will find in this work an enduring and illuminating resource.