Person in the World by Mary Catharine Baseheart (review)

490 BOOK REVIEWS After chapter 3 takes the reader through the present life, chapter 4 turns to the heavenly goal. Here the way Leget divides up "eternal life" into consideration of the glorified soul, glorified body, and glorified creation puts what is normally conceived purely personally into a communal context, and sets up a clever treatment of "the 'logic' of hell," where "Aquinas' account of mors aeterna is in every respect the reverse of heaven." Certainly Dante understood that while God is the center of heaven, "in hell everything is sought in accordance with one's own profit." Leget points out that there is an analogy between "eternal punishment" and "capital punishment on earth, which is not directed at the emendation of the one sentenced, but to the profit of the community," which perhaps shows why our contemporaries find them equally objectionable. Leget's work bears the marks of a first effort, and includes some blemishes. Apart from problems of substance such as those mentioned above, it reads too much like a dissertation, though one rather skimpy in the use of secondary sources. The ethical works of Grisez, Finnis, and Mcinerny are not even listed in the bibliography. It also includes minor distractions like using Deferrari's now fifty-year-old Lexicon (22 n. 47), even though the author clearly knows Busa, and using Weisheipl's biography (4) rather than Torrell, whose 1993 work is not mentioned. But looking at Aquinas's moral thought by paying close attention to its explicitly religious dimension, especially introducing the nowpopular "narrative" approach in a way that is quite faithful to the thought of Aquinas, as Leget does, makes for an intrinsically worthwhile, if less than perfect, book. One hopes that when Dr. Leget turns again to this topic he will look more carefully at the wide variety of fine work now being done in Thomistic ethics by Anglo-American philosophers, and that he will enter into discussion with more of them. Center for Thomistic Studies Houston, Texas R.E.HOUSER Person in the World. By MARY CATHARINE BASEHEART. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. Pp. 204. $99.00 ISBN 0-7923-4490-1. Almost anyone who has heard of Edith Stein knows that she was a German-Jewish Carmelite nun who was put to death at Auschwitz by the Nazis and recently canonized by Pope John Paul II. Many will also recall that she was an intellectual, a feminist, and a student and associate of the philosopher Edmund Husserl. But few, unless they have a working acquaintance with the phenomenological movement and the German language, are likely to be familiar with her significance as a philosopher in her own right. BOOK REVIEWS 491 Person in the World was written to redress this need. It is the first comprehensive introduction to Stein's philosophy in English. This fact alone makes it a major achievement. Much of it is based on Baseheart's doctoral dissertation, "The Encounter of Husserl's Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas in Selected Writings of Edith Stein," written at Notre Dame almost forty years ago, in 1960. The reason for the delay in publication is that immediately after completing her dissertation, Baseheart was pressed into administrative duties as dean at Spalding University, a position she occupied for nearly twenty years. Tragically, she died in 1994, just before receiving word that the manuscript of Person in the World, the culmination of her scholarly life's work, had been accepted for publication. We owe a debt of thanks to John R. Wilcox and the Edith Stein Center for Study and Research, which Baseheart founded at Spalding University in 1990, for seeing her magnum opus through to its final publication. Despite its comparative brevity, Person in the World is a large accomplishment , offering an overview of Stein's entire philosophical development. Starting with a synopsis of her life and thought, it proceeds with a careful analysis of her ideas that progresses through chapters that are divided in a topical and chronological sequence. Beginning with Stein's study On the Problem of Empathy, which she wrote as her doctoral dissertation under Edmund Husserl in 1916, it follows her use of the phenomenological method to examine such...