The Institute of Philosophy Edith Stein of the Archdioceses of Granada is erected by the Archbishop of Granada by means of decree of August 9, 2005, date in which its statutes were approved. Its basic purpose is to offer a space of love for wisdom ("philosophy") provoking thought, within the Sacred Tradition of the Church, and therefore, in light of the Christian event, about reality and its significance.

The Christian event, in which history reaches its climax, is the Incarnation of the Son of God and the Easter mystery, which prolongs the life of the Church. The Christian event is an experience of redemption, the work of Christ in which the Trill God communicates and announces himself to man. In this God's Mystery is revealed, and the mystery of man is illuminated: "Christ, the new Adam, in Revelation of the mystery of the Father itself and of his love, man makes himself known entirely to man and reveals the sublimity of his vocation " [II Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 22]. The Christian event, in which our horizons are open to eternal life, as a raison d'ętre of our created existence, is not only related to the orientation of mans actions, it also reveals who God is, what the world is and what human life is.

We are aware of the fact that the appeal to the Sacred Tradition of the Church, rightly lived and understood, is always, also in the current world, is safeguard of freedom and integrity in the use of reason, and is condition of possibility for a serious respectful dialog full of affection, with other religious experiences and with other cultures.

The Institute takes the name of Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, patron saint of Europe) because her philosophy offers a model of excellence to today’s Christian philosophy. Born and raised as Jewish, she was one of the first women to have obtained a doctorate in philosophy in Germany, but the fact of being a woman prevented her from obtaining an academic position. She was a disciple and an assistant of Husserl. In her work, Edith Stein does not reject any of the elements that constitute the experience of reality. She knew, when she wrote to a companion after receiving the news of her mentor Husserl´s death, saying: "I could never bring myself to think that God's mercy confines itself to the Church. God is the truth. Who ever seeks the truth, is seeking God, whether consciously or unconsciously." Her vital commitment to the truth afforded her a definitive impulse for her meeting with Christ. Her philosophy led phenomenology to being open to new questions and to a reunion with tradition, especially with Saint Thomas. Carmelite and martyr, victim of one of the most terrible totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, in her we discover a philosophical path that makes a real dialog possible within the Christian faith with the culture and the intellectual positions of man today.

We try to answer to the questions of the human being, and to understand why man sometimes does not question himself, giving a rigorously intellectual attention to the historicity of intelligence and of human experience, and therefore to the cultural and traditional dimension of reason. As a result, we will bear the cultural context in mind, of what is called often "a post-modernity", not to make a paradigm out of it, to which faith would have to get accommodated, but to judge it with its own terms based on the experience of the Church, and to try to understand it from history, tracing its "genealogy".