Edith Stein, who began her career as Husserl’s research assistant, was an important philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, but her work was ultimately marginalized in Nazi Germany and she died in a concentration camp. This paper unearths and discusses her first substantive work, On the Problem of Empathy, which is the problem of how other persons and their inner states can be given to others. In terms of “the problem of other minds,” how we perceive those is through the irreducible intentional state of empathy. Stein wants to distinguish between the descriptive-psychological (distinguished by Husserl’s ideation of intentional states) and genetic-psychological (supported by empirical analysis) aspects of this problem. Stein felt empathy was an act of ideation through which we can systematically and comprehensively discern not only others’ spiritual types but our own. Empathy is a prerequisite for both knowledge of others and the self.