Abstract

What is "scientific" about the natural and human sciences? Consensus seems even more distant now than in the early twentieth century, when phenomenologists first addressed this question. Edith Stein argued that human beings understand the motivated actions of others through a distinctive capacity of subjectivity: egoic following, or Einfuhlung. We also follow the causal chains comprising the coherence of the natural world. The necessity of causality contrasts with the optionality of motivation, but the interplay of the two is essential to the practice of any science. ;Stein's hermeneutic and her poietic were set forth in publications of 1917 and 1922. On the basis of Stein's work, this dissertation explores the literacy of science. The first chapter examines antecedents of phenomenology and the Munich phenomenologists . The second chapter reviews Husserl's work on intersubjectivity up to and including Ideen II--a text shown to be logically incoherent. The third chapter discusses Stein's hermeneutical theory. The fourth chapter examines her hermeneutical practices and classifies her work into anonymous, autographical, and autobiographical writing. It becomes clear that Stein, who worked as Husserl's assistant,, is responsible for Ideen II's argument that the live body is logically prior to object constitution. The fifth chapter surveys divergent interpretations of Stein by education-scientists, theologians, philosophers, feminists, and Jews. Three modes of reading are identified: "docility," "echoing," and "chiseling." The sixth chapter considers recent feminist critiques of science made on psychoanalytic and materialist grounds. These are found to employ deficient modes of reading: "echoing" and "chiseling," respectively, which entail inappropriate deployments of subjectivity. But Stein's poietic theory, presented in her 1922 essay on "psychic causality," approaches science through the interplay of causality and motivation within the live human body itself. The capacity for egoic following among embodied individuals suggests a "realfeminist" philosophy of science, which is here proposed in its basic points with illustrations drawn from practices in contemporary archaeological science.