The theme that runs through all of Stein’s work is an inquiry into the nature of the human person. Beginning with her dissertation on empathy, and following through to the works of her maturity, the reader becomes aware of the thrust toward revealing the person as person, in its universality, transcending time and place and cultural milieu. Stein holds that phenomenology supplies the most effective means towards arriving at knowledge of what it means to be a person, and that phenomenological analysis can reveal the essential constitution of human-being-in-the-world..