Edith Stein was Husserl's assistant from 1916, for a few years (?).
In April 1913 Stein arrived in Göttingen in order to study for the summer semester with Edmund Husserl. By the end of the summer she had decided to pursue her degree in philosophy under Husserl and chose "Empathy" as her thesis topic. Her studies were interrupted in July 1914 because of the outbreak of World War I. She then served as a volunteer wartime Red Cross nurse in an infectious diseases hospital at Märisch-Weisskirchen in 1915. In 1916, Stein moved to Freiburg in order to complete her dissertation on Empathy. Shortly before receiving her degree she agreed to become Husserl's assistant. After her dissertation entitled Zum Problem der Einfühlung (On the Problem of Empathy) was awarded on 3 August 1916, which made her a doctor of philosophy with the summa cum laude honor,[6] she began working independently as Husserl's assistant. In his 2007 thesis, "The Philosophical Contributions of Edith Stein",[7] John C. Wilhelmsson argues that Stein influenced the work of Husserl significantly during this period. She then became a member of the faculty at the University of Freiburg, where she worked as a teaching assistant to Husserl, who had transferred to that institution. Because she was a woman, Husserl did not support her submitting her habilitational thesis (a prerequisite for an academic chair) to the University of Freiburg in 1918. Her other thesis, Psychische Kausalität (Sentient Causality),[8] submitted at the University of Göttingen the following year, was likewise rejected.
While Stein had earlier contacts with Catholicism, it was her reading of the autobiography of the mystic Teresa of Ávila during summer holidays in Bad Bergzabern in 1921 that prompted her conversion. Baptized on 1 January 1922, and dissuaded by her spiritual advisers from immediately seeking entry to the religious life, she obtained a position to teach at the Dominican nuns' school in Speyer from 1923 to 1931. While there, she translated Thomas Aquinas' De Veritate (Of Truth) into German, familiarized herself with Catholic philosophy in general, and tried to bridge the phenomenology of her former teacher, Husserl, to Thomism. She visited Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg in April 1929, the same month that Heidegger gave a speech to Husserl on his 70th birthday. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Catholic Church-affiliated Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, but antisemitic legislation passed by the Nazi government forced her to resign the post in 1933. In a letter to Pope Pius XI, she denounced the Nazi regime and asked the Pope to openly denounce the regime "to put a stop to this abuse of Christ's name."
Edith Stein attended the private lectures of Max Scheler in Gottingen, was very much impressed, and reported that Scheler's influence on her went far beyond philosophy. (Manfred Frings, 1997, p. 10)
