ABSTRACT

While the concept of empathy is relatively new to the philosophical scene, it is taken to identify a range of affective phenomena that have presumably been with us all along. Empathy is sometimes thought essential to morality, the hallmark of love, a key to understanding the mental life of others, our natural safeguard against narcissism, even the emotional import of basic forms of mirror-neurological activity. 1 Despite its relative youth, research on empathy has attracted the attention of scholars working in many fields and it is put to a vast array of theoretical uses. If there is anything common to many of the theories of empathy currently on offer, it is that empathy makes possible an especially intimate and powerful form of identification. It underwrites our capacity—put imprecisely at first mention—to feel not just for another but as another. 2 To this extent, empathy has as its goal the overstepping, in emotion, of the space that runs between oneself and another. This may sound like a tall order, and one is at times justified in thinking that there is a grandness to many discussions of empathy that would make modest philosophers uncomfortable. But this should also suffice to convey a sense of why the concept of empathy has piqued the interest of philosophers of mind and emotion, ethicists, and philosophers of art.