Value Phenomenology

This work explores Edith Stein’s phenomenology of values as found in her early work—specifically, in her Contributions to a Philosophical Foundation for Psychology and the Humanities (1922). Mette Lebech makes a constructive exposition of its implications by discussing the experience of value and motivation (Part I), that which constitutes a value-response (Part II), and how certain later approximations to value-phenomenology can be clarified by means of Stein’s thought (Part III). Stein’s synthesis of Husserl’s founding of the sciences, along with Scheler’s phenomenological discussion of values, emotion, and sociality, carries Stein’s specific contributions, such as: the distinction between psychic causality and motivation—which allows for a clear interpretation of how emotion relates to values—(Part I) and the understanding of how the experience of value and preference constitutes the personal “I,” the basis for the value hierarchy, the psyche, the structure of intersubjectivity, and the world (Part II). Finally, Lebech examines the vestiges of value phenomenology found in Heidegger, Levinas, and de Beauvoir in the context of a Steinian discussion (Part III).