Edith Stein

Edith Stein was Husserl's most brilliant assistant and one of the first women in Germany to earn a doctorate in philosophy – under him, in 1916. Her dissertation, On the Problem of Empathy, examined Einfühlung: how another person's consciousness is given to me, how I know at all that there is someone before me and not a thing. Born into a Jewish family, at fourteen she declared herself an atheist and stopped praying.

One summer, staying with friends, she took the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila down from a shelf and read through the whole night without stopping. Closing the book at dawn, she said: "This is the truth." Stein was baptized, and later became a Carmelite nun under the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. In Finite and Eternal Being she brought Husserl's phenomenology together with Aquinas's metaphysics of being – essence and existence, form and matter – as though her whole life had been leading to that bridge.

In July 1942 the Dutch Catholic bishops publicly condemned the deportation of the Jews. In reprisal the Nazis arrested baptized Catholics of Jewish descent across Holland. Stein was taken from her convent together with her sister Rosa; a few days later, in August 1942, she was murdered at Auschwitz. Phenomenology had walked all the way to the Cross and did not blink. She was killed for who she was, and in a century that still kills for it, her name needs no commentary.