Sarah Borden Sharkey – författare

Edith Stein was one of the important early phenomenologists. A German-Jewish philosopher, Discalced Carmelite nun, martyr, and saint who died in Auschwitz, Stein participated in the early 20th century revival of scholasticism and was much admired by John Paul II. ""Thine Own Self"" focuses on Stein's later writings and in particular her magnum opus, ""Finite and Eternal Being"". Although completed in 1936, Stein's book was not published at the time because of the new laws against non-Aryan publications, and the work sat completed but unread until after World War II. The recent availability of this book in English makes a substantive scholarly analysis of this major text particularly timely. ""Thine Own Self"" investigates Stein's account of human individuality and her mature philosophical positions on being and essence. Sarah Borden Sharkey shows how Stein's account of individual form adapts the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition in order to account for evolution and more contemporary insights in personality and individual distinctiveness. Borden Sharkey explains how Stein's theory of individuality and individual forms is tied to her understanding of essence and being, and she compares Stein's distinctive metaphysical positions to those of Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and Edmund Husserl. In addition to expositing Stein's metaphysical positions, Borden Sharkey argues that, although Stein's account of individual forms is both more contemporary and more adequate than John Duns Scotus' haecceitas, it is nonetheless problematic. The book concludes by defending a more Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of form - albeit one that must be re articulated in light of contemporary and Steinian critiques.

There are few topics more central to philosophical discussions than the meaning of being, and few thinkers offer a more compelling and original vision of that meaning than Edith Stein (1891–1942). Stein’s magnum opus, drawing from her decades working with the early phenomenologists and intense years as a student and translator of medieval texts, lays out a grand vision, bringing together phenomenological and scholastic insights into an integrated whole. The sheer scope of Stein’s project in Finite and Eternal Being is daunting, and the text can be challenging to navigate. In this book, Sarah Borden Sharkey provides a guide to Stein’s great final philosophical work and intellectual vision. The opening essays give an overview of Stein’s method and argument, and they place Finite and Eternal Being both within its historical context and in relation to contemporary discussions. The author also provides clear, detailed summaries of each section of Stein’s opus, drawing from the latest scholarship on Stein’s manuscript. Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being: A Companion offers a unique guide, opening up Stein’s grand cathedral-like vision of the meaning of being as the unfolding of meaning.

This book articulates the theoretical outlines of a feminism developed from Aristotle’s metaphysics, making a new contribution to feminist theory. Readers will discover why Aristotle was not a feminist and how he might have become one, through an investigation of Aristotle and Aristotelian tradition. The author shows how Aristotle’s metaphysics can be used to articulate a particularly subtle and theoretically powerful understanding of gender that may offer a highly useful tool for distinctively feminist arguments.This work builds on Martha Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’ in a more explicitly and thoroughly hylomorphist way. The author shows how Aristotle’s hylomorphic model, developed to run between the extremes of Platonic dualism and Democritean atomism, can similarly be used today to articulate a view of gender that takes bodily differences seriously without reducing gender to biological determinations.Although written for theorists, this scholarly yet accessiblebook can be used to address more practical issues and the final chapter explores women in universities as one example. This book will appeal to both feminists with limited familiarity with Aristotle’s philosophy, and scholars of Aristotle with limited familiarity with feminism.