The Flower and The Wind. Edith Stein and Edmund Husserl on The Idealism-Realism Dispute

Abstract

This article deals with the thorny debate idealism-realism that arose within the phenomenological school between Edmund Husserl and his students. After a first contextualization of the problem, it examines Edith Stein's position regarding the aforementioned question and the discussed Husserlian idealism, and shows how the phenomenologist re-dimensioned the role of the self in the cognitive activity: no longer as an absolute and unconditioned subject of knowledge, but as a finite and limited creature that relates to a transcendent world, independent of the activity of consciousness.