A Pilgrimage to Iceland - Paperback

The author, John Wilhemsson, is a professor of philosophy at San Jose State University who has made an in-depth study of this remarkable woman's contributions to the body of philosophy. In this small book he seeks to establish that Stein did not merely copy or assist the great male philosophers of her day but in fact had unique and valuable ideas that deserve to be credited. The book is biographical only in a limited sense: the author must give the reader a brief picture of Stein - a child prodigy with unusual empathy and caring for others whose philosophical bent developed when she went to university and studied with the great Edmund Husserl and others. The author rigorously develops his single point: that Stein was a philosopher in her own right whose ideas of phenomenology and particularly of feminism are worthy of recognition, and indeed dovetail aptly with the thinking of Pope John Paul II. -Barbara Bamberger Scott