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 ›
Empathy
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 Validation of Empathy in Psychoanalysis
The argument of this blog post is that empathy can adequately be validated by formulating one’s empathic receptivity in an interpretation, which, in turn, is subject to confirming or refuting experiences, responses, reactions, replies. The unpacking of the term “empathy” into… Read More ›
Empathy and Other Minds: Autism and Solipsism
The classical philosophical problem of other minds has been replaced with the cognitive tasks of mindreading, simulating worlds and minds, and, more particularly, accounting for false belief. More about these latter in the post on Empathy and Analogy devoted to… 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 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 