Empathic Understanding : Historical and Recent Perspectives on Empathy's Role in Social Cognition and Aesthetics

Abstract

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book follows a long tradition of philosophical research on empathy, reaching back to the Scottish sentimentalism debate in the eighteenth century and to the German debate on “Einfuhlung” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It presents the latest developments in research on empathy in three areas: empathy and understanding other people, empathy and understanding literature and arts, and the history of empathy. Simulation theorists claim that low-level empathy is a process of simulation which enables the empathizer to recognize the target's mental state. Perception theorists claim that mental state recognition in face-to-face situations is a process of direct perception. Theory theorists argue that high-level empathy has to be understood in terms of folk psychology and the empathizer's inferences.