Experimental philosophy really started to get traction in John Locke’s engaging answer to William Molyneux’s thought experiment about the individual blind from birth who suddenly gets his vision. What happens? In a daring experiment, which gives the subtitle to the… Read More ›
Philosophy
The Philosophical Significance of Neurology for Empathy – The Light Goes on!!!
Join me in a conversation about empathy and neurology. The short version is that the individual experiences empathy and the light goes on! Today’s inquiry explores the philosophical significance for empathy of the research on the mirror neurons, the related… Read More ›
The Development of Sympathy in Hume’s Thinking: From a ‘Delicacy of Sympathy’ [i.e., Empathy] to a Taste
Draft article: DraftHumeSympathy20091116Agosta There is a long history in British empiricist philosophy that engages “sympathy.” There are at least four meanings of “sympathy” in the writings of David Hume, dating to his a Treatise on Human Nature (1739). In today’s… Read More ›
Heidegger’s Special Hermeneutic of Empathy, the Essay
The article at the end of this post is a rough draft – very rough – of material eventually worked into my book of the same title, Empathy in the Context of Philosophy (Palgrave 2010). It is useful in that… Read More ›
The Disappearance and Rehabilitation of Introspection
Introspection extends from an attempt to isolate and report on an individual sensation such as the color or smell of a rose; to the account of a formal meditation or instructions on how to perform one, undertaken and published by… Read More ›
Communicability of Affect: A Kantian Approach to Other Minds: Short Version
Regarding skeptical doubts about the external world, Kant turns from the approach of dialectical illusion in the Dialectic to the Refutation of Idealism in the Analytic, missing an antinomy of Other Minds, which is considered here. Taking a clue from… Read More ›
Rewriting the History of Empathy
This post on the philosophical history of empathy proceeds from the following position. While we live in an understanding of what is empathy, and appreciate that empathy is central to our relations with other human beings, we really do not… Read More ›
The Healing Properties of Empathy in the Context of the Self
In this blog post (and the related article (draft)), the argument is that empathy is the matrix out of which the self emerges. In this conversation, empathy is positioned as an on-going process of distinguishing, sustaining, and strengthening the structure… Read More ›
Empathy and Analogy: Mindreading and Simulation
The argument of this post is that mindreading, theory of mind (“mentalizing”), and simulation theory are fundamentally flawed. What is lacking is empathy. It is not that these do not mention “empathy.” It occurs as both the target of explanation… Read More ›
Empathy and Altruism: From Possibility to Implementation
The argument of today’s conversation is that empathy is required in order to get from the possibility of altruism to its implementation. A logical space is available to establish a link between empathy and the austere ethics of duty (“deontology”)…. Read More ›
Empathy Lessons 