SPIRITUAL ACTS IN ANTHROPOLOGY. EDITH STEIN’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The aim of the present contribution is to prove that spiritual acts not only play a significant role in the phenomenological description of the person and in individual and social experiences, but likewise they play a decisive role in the methodological constitution of phenomenology and have a core function in the theoretical structuring of the phenomenological description of the person, regarding, for example, metaphysical and anthropological characteristics. Firstly, in the paper, the implications for anthropology that arise from Edith Stein’s phenomenology are examined. In the second part—from the insight that Stein does not structure anthropology without its metaphysical background—the paper underlines the metaphysical presuppositions of anthropology in Stein’s thinking. In both stages, the investigation engages with Husserlian insights that Stein took on board and creatively introduced from Husserl’s thought into her own work. The inference from this engagement of Stein with Husserl emerges in the way Stein structures anthropology in general, and the origin of this can be seen in the description of the person as a psychophysical individual. At this point, the question arises regarding how the description of the spiritual acts can contribute to the structure of the person and, in this sense, to the foundation of anthropology as a philosophical-theological science.