Edith Stein

The other thing I did yesterday - completely overshadowed by Thor, of course - was that I went to a small philosophy conference in the late afternoon. The soft-spoken Sue Cataldi gave a talk relating Edith Stein's writings on empathy to her later feminist writings, and the very appealing Mariana Ortega offered commentary. Stein was a Jewish-born convert to Catholicism who served as Husserl's assistant for quite a while and later was murdered at Auschwitz, then recently canonized.

Cataldi's point was that Stein seems to indicate that empathy requires not only understanding the other's feelings, but also understanding one's own location towards the situation in terms of privilege and power. Ortega added the points that such relationships are not binary (one can be both oppressor and oppressed, at the same time, and one can be empathetic towards members of some relatively powerless groups while patronizing and dismissive of others). She (and members of the audience) also took issue with some of Cataldi's wording.

I was happy that I was able to follow the entire discussion, though I hadn't before heard the word "architectonic," but it only came up at the very end. Also they served a nice array of melon slices and a tray of about twenty types of cheese.