 The publication of the 27-volume Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe has confirmed Stein as an independent, creative, and highly productive philosopher, who made original contributions on such diverse topics as personhood and the apprehension of others in empathy, collective intentionality and shared experiences, emotions and values, the nature of the state, the education of women and women’s rights and the nature of being and essence. Stein was not only in critical discussion with her contemporaries, including philosophers such as Pfänder, Scheler, Reinach, or Husserl, psychologists such as Lipps, Münsterberg, or Stumpf, and sociologists such as Tönnies, Litt, or Simmel, but her work also harbors rich conceptual, methodological and systematic resources that are of continued relevance for a number of recent philosophical and interdisciplinary debates. While in her earlier writings Stein pursued detailed phenomenological analyses, in her later work she engaged in metaphysics, but also in philosophical and theological anthropology and mysticism. Integrating eidetic phenomenology and Thomistic metaphysics, Stein ultimately developed a novel systematic account of social life that is the produce of the actions of free, individual persons, whose experiences and volitions are rooted in cognitions as well as emotions and who can attain the level of rational and communal life that is open to the possibility of a transcendence, lifting humans beyond their finitude.