Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past is a comprehensive consideration of the role of empathy in historical knowledge, informed by the literature on empathy in fields including history, psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and sociology. The book seeks to raise the consciousness of historians about empathy, by introducing them to the history of the concept and to its status in fields outside of history. It also seeks to raise the self-consciousness of historians about their use of empathy to know and understand past people. Defining empathy as thinking and feeling, as imagining, one’s way inside the experience of others in order to know and understand them, Thomas A. Kohut distinguishes between the external and the empathic observational position, the position of the historical subject. He argues that historians need to be aware of their observational position, of when they are empathizing and when they are not. Indeed, Kohut advocates for the deliberate, self-reflective use of empathy as a legitimate and important mode of historical inquiry. Insightful, cogent, and interdisciplinary, the book will be essential for historians, students of history, and psychoanalysts, as well as those in other fields who seek to seek to know and understand human beings.

Recent work on empathy theory, research, and applications, by scholars from disciplines ranging from neuroscience to psychoanalysis. There are many reasons for scholars to investigate empathy. Empathy plays a crucial role in human social interaction at all stages of life; it is thought to help motivate positive social behavior, inhibit aggression, and provide the affective and motivational bases for moral development; it is a necessary component of psychotherapy and patient-physician interactions. This volume covers a wide range of topics in empathy theory, research, and applications, helping to integrate perspectives as varied as anthropology and neuroscience. The contributors discuss the evolution of empathy within the mammalian brain and the development of empathy in infants and children; the relationships among empathy, social behavior, compassion, and altruism; the neural underpinnings of empathy; cognitive versus emotional empathy in clinical practice; and the cost of empathy. Taken together, the contributions significantly broaden the interdisciplinary scope of empathy studies, reporting on current knowledge of the evolutionary, social, developmental, cognitive, and neurobiological aspects of empathy and linking this capacity to human communication, including in clinical practice and medical education.

Examines the importance of empathy in a wide range of disciplines including ethics, aesthetics, and psychology.

Empathy plays a central role in the history and contemporary study of ethics, interpersonal understanding, and the emotions, yet until now has been relatively underexplored. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting field and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six parts: Core issues History of empathy Empathy and understanding Empathy and morals Empathy in art and aesthetics Empathy and individual differences. Within these sections central topics and problems are examined, including: empathy and imagination; neuroscience; David Hume and Adam Smith; understanding; evolution; altruism; moral responsibility; art, aesthetics, and literature; gender; empathy and related disciplines such as anthropology. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, particularly ethics and philosophy of mind and psychology, the Handbook will also be of interest to those in related fields, such as anthropology and social psychology.

There is widespread disagreement over what constitutes an experience of empathy. In this study of its value and moral features, Mark Fagiano acknowledges the ambiguity surrounding the term and offers a unified theory of empathy that includes rival definitions. His historical account of the multiple meanings of empathy lays the groundwork for a new philosophical theory. Based on relations, it resolves the problem of conflicting definitions of empathy by distinguishing between the three kinds of empathy: the relations of feeling into, feeling with, and feeling for, each of which has been defined historically as a type of empathy. Fagiano's unique focus on relations, on the modes and manner by which we are connected with things and with people, reveals a transactional account of empathy that can be applied to a variety of different contexts and social circumstances. Grounded in the philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism, Fagiano's approach demonstrates the practical benefits of adopting a broad and pluralistic understanding of empathy as both an idea and a practice. His pragmatic and contextualist philosophy of empathy provides a valuable starting point for answering some of the most pressing questions surrounding empathy today, including can empathy be developed? Is empathy moral? What is the difference between empathy and sympathy?

Exploring the role of empathy in a variety of Pacific societies, this book is at the forefront of the latest anthropological research on empathy. It presents distinct articulations of many assumptions of contemporary philosophical, neurobiological, and social scientific treatments of the topic. The variations described in this book do not necessarily preclude the possibility of shared existential, biological, and social influences that give empathy a distinctly human cast, but they do provide an important ethnographic lens through which to examine the possibilities and limits of empathy in any given community of practice.

Does empathy help us to be moral? The author argues that empathy is often instrumental to meeting the demands of morality as defined by various ethical theories. This multi-faceted work links psychological research on empathy with ethical theory and contemporary trends in moral education.

Empathy—our capacity to cognitively or affectively connect with other people’s thoughts and feelings—is a concept whose definition and meaning varies widely within philosophy and other disciplines. Philosophical Perspectives on Empathy advances research on the nature and function of empathy by exploring and challenging different theoretical approaches to this phenomenon. The first section of the book explores empathy as a historiographical method, presenting a number of rich and interesting arguments that have influenced the debate from the Nineteenth Century to the present day. The next group of essays broadly accepts the centrality of perspective-taking in empathy. Here the authors attempt to refine and improve this particular conception of empathy by clarifying the intentionality of the perspective taker’s emotion, the perspective taker’s meta-cognitive capacities, and the nature of central imagining itself. Finally, the concluding section argues for the re-evaluation, or even rejection, of empathy. These essays advance alternative theories that are relevant to current debates, such as narrative engagement and competence, attunement or the sharing of mental states, and the "second-person" model of empathy. This book features a wide range of perspectives on empathy written by experts across several different areas of philosophy. It will be of interest to researchers and upper-level students working on the philosophy of emotions across ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and the history of philosophy.

In the mid-1950s C.P. Snow began his campaign against the 'two cultures' - the debilitating divide, as he saw it, between traditional 'literary intellectual' culture, and the culture of the sciences, urging in its place a 'third culture' which would draw upon and integrate the resources of disciplines spanning the natural and social sciences, the arts and the humanities. Murray Smith argues that, with the ever-increasing influence of evolutionary theory and neuroscience, and the pervasive presence of digital technologies, Snow's challenge is more relevant than ever. Working out how the 'scientific' and everyday images of the world 'hang' together is no simple matter. In Film, Art, and the Third Culture, Smith explores this question in relation to the art, technology, and science of film in particular, and to the world of the arts and aesthetic activity more generally. In the first part of his book, Smith explores the general strategies and principles necessary to build a 'third cultural' or naturalized approach to film and art - one that roots itself in an appreciation of scientific knowledge and method. Smith then goes on to focus on the role of emotion in film and the other arts, as an extended experiment in the 'third cultural' integration of ideas on emotion spanning the arts, humanities and sciences. While acknowledging that not all of the questions we ask are scientific in nature, Smith contends that we cannot disregard the insights wrought by taking a naturalized approach to the aesthetics of film and the other arts.

Recent developments in cognitive narrative theory have called attention to readers' active participation in making sense of narrative. However, while most psychologically inspired models address interpreters' subpersonal (i.e., unconscious) responses, the experiential level of their engagement with narrative remains relatively undertheorized. Building on theories of experience and embodiment within today's "second-generation" cognitive science, and opening a dialogue with so-called "enactivist" philosophy, this book sets out to explore how narrative experiences arise from the interaction between textual cues and readers' past experiences. Caracciolo's study offers a phenomenologically inspired account of narrative, spanning a wide gamut of responses such as the embodied dynamic of imagining a fictional world, empathetic perspective-taking in relating to characters, and "higher-order" evaluations and interpretations. Only by placing a premium on how such modes of engagement are intertwined in experience, Caracciolo argues, can we do justice to narrative's psychological and existential impact on our lives. These insights are illustrated through close readings of literary texts ranging from Émile Zola's Germinal to José Saramago's Blindness.