Abstract
By the mid-1920s of the past century, Edmund Husserl had established that empathy was the act whereby the infant became a child. Empathy brought the child into the intersubjective world of others, the personal world of Ideen II. In 1916, Edith Stein wrote the book on empathy, with Husserl as her director. If persons with Autistic Syndrome Disorders (ASD) are on that spectrum because they do not provide behavioral evidence of empathic acts, they have not constituted the world of persons. However, as I have shown in earlier work, high-functioning persons with autism or Asperger’s Syndrome do participate in the shared world of objects (Ideen I) as well as symbiotic relations with pre-others. Empathy presents the ceiling as well as the telos of autism. Stein’s early work describes the necessary conditions for empathic meanings, which yield knowledge of the individual other. This paper explores how Stein’s analysis has an impact on an appropriate understanding of ASD.
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Notes
- 1.
Mette Lebech, “Why Do We Need The Philosophy of Edith Stein,” in Communio, Winter 2011, 682–727, 683.
- 2.
Husserl. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, ed. Iso Kern (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 605–606.
- 3.
Baseheart [1, 38].
Reference
Mary Catherine Baseheart, Person in the World (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997)
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Haney, K.M. (2016). Edith Stein on Autism. In: Calcagno, A. (eds) Edith Stein: Women, Social-Political Philosophy, Theology, Metaphysics and Public History. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21124-4_10
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