What is empathy and what do we need it for?
At Södertörn University August 16-18, 2012, arranged by Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge
The last ten years we have witnessed an exploding interest in the phenomenon of empathy. The wave of empathy studies is psychology, philosophy, psychiatry and other disciplines is linked to a parallel theoretical interest in the phenomena of feeling, selfhood, inter-subjectivity and morality, but also to practical attempts to understand and improve meetings between workers and clients in different professions, such as health care professions, teaching professions, psychotherapy or social work. To be empathic is increasingly viewed as a must for any person working in cooperation with and/or helping other people, although, as is also pointed out, the empathy must be professional in character to not produce destructive intimacy or burn out. The question of what “professional empathy” might be and how it is possible, or, indeed, fruitful to attain such ability is an interesting one in itself.
The theoretical underpinnings of empathy studies roughly divide it into two camps: the theory-theory approaches, and the simulation-theory approaches. The ideas that to have a theory of mind or an ability to put oneself in the shoes of another are necessary for empathy can serve either as philosophical clarifications of empathy or as taken for granted starting points of the empathy studies; in both cases, however, it is becoming increasingly evident by way of empirical results as well as conceptual clarification that the two approaches are relying on ideas of inter-subjective understanding which do not get the relationships between feeling, thought and action in empathy exactly right. To be empathic does not seem to consist in being able to think that the other is like me, or imagining what it is like to be him, in feeling or acting on his behalf. It is true that most adults that show empathy are able to think and imagine that the other is like me and what it would be like to be in his predicament, but this is neither necessary nor sufficient for being empathic. Rather these two abilities can reinforce and develop an empathic attitude which in its basic form is developed as a feeling in its own right.
To talk about affective and cognitive empathy as two parts or stages of the phenomenon does not solve the issue of how the two belong together, and it, indeed, seems to leave the account of action (acting in order to help the person one feels and understands is suffering) out of empathy altogether. Most suffering persons would surely prefer a fellow being who actually does something for them in contrast to just telling them that they understand and feel sorry for them. This issue connects the discussion of what empathy is to ethics. Is empathy a corner stone of morality, perhaps a necessary constituent in the makeup of every moral subject, or is it rather a bad substitute for ethical concepts such as respect and responsibility, allowing people to think and say that they really know what it is to be in the position of the other, and perhaps, also, to feel sorry for the other rather than doing anything about his suffering?
In the conference we want to gather academics and practitioners from different disciplines who try to move beyond (not beside) the theory-theory and the simulation-theory approaches to empathy. We want to address the question of what empathy is from an empirical as well as theoretical perspective, and we want to connect the issue to what role empathy serves in the development of human beings as well as the exercise of human based professions. Abstracts for presentations addressing these issues and not exceeding 600 words should be sent to the conference secretary martin.gunnarson@sh.se no later than the 15 of April (2012). Final program will be distributed in May 2012.
Fredrik Svenaeus and Martin Gunnarson
Keynote speakers:
Lou Agosta, Chicago School of Professional Psychology
Thomas Fuchs, University of Heidelberg
Jodi Halpern, University of California Berkeley
Matthew Ratcliffe, Durham University
Jan Slaby, Freie Universität Berlin
Speaking personally (and this is Lou Agosta speaking), I struggle with a misunderstanding about my work in empathy studies. When I say that I work on empathy that sometimes lands int he listening of the audience as if empathy were only over here with me and “over there” with the audience was a need for more or better or different empathy. This is misunderstanding. Empathy does NOT belong to any one individual. It lives in the relatedness between speaker and listener. It lives in the community. Empathy in any form or context causes expanded empathy in every form and context.

Advance Praise for Empathy in the Context of Philosophy
Tags: blurbs, Empathy, nice comments
I am humbled by the comments of my colleagues, friends, and associates.
“An insightful and provocative exploration of a topic that has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves and the conceptual clarity needed for a proper understanding. Agosta’s study is rich in historical context and thorough in covering the intersections of philosophy and psychology on the question of empathy. It is also accessible and stimulating for a host of applications to current concerns. Agosta rightly, in my view, finds in Heidegger a primary vehicle for advancing the discussion, yet he has his own voice and sense of how to think it through. An impressive achievement.”
Lawrence J. Hatab
Louis I. Jaffe Professor of Philosophy
Old Dominion University
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That much used and routinely abused word, empathy, has enjoyed an uncomfortable popularity in fields as disparate as politics and psychoanalysis. At last a philosopher has arrived to bring clarity to the confusion. Lou Agosta has brought together the salient points about empathy as seen in neurology, psychoanalysis and literature into a happy home under Heidegger. Heidegger calls for ‘a special hermeneutic of empathy’ but does not give one. Agosta delivers it. The book is a must-read for anyone who chooses to use the word again.
Arnold Goldberg, M.D.
Author, Misunderstanding Freud
Professor of Psychiatry
Rush University Medical College
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Lou Agosta’s Empathy in the Context of Philosophy is a vivid, sweeping, thought-provoking and attitude changing treatment of one of the central, if often neglected, ideas of our culture, namely Empathy. It collects and scrutinizes ideas from a remarkable array of sources — from neuroscience to hermeneutics, from analytic philosophy to Freudian psychoanalysis, from Grimm Brothers stories to speech acts — all the while demonstrating Empathy’s seminal role in our understanding of mind, ethics, and ourselves. If morality stands apart from empathy, Dr. Agosta also shows how it is a pre-condition of it. He does this, and quite a bit more, through a lively tour of much of Twentieth Century thought, all the way correcting some of that thought’s myopia and self-righteousness, and allows us to regain a fine understanding, perhaps lost in the travails of modern life, of what it is that both makes us human and provides the possibility of joy with others.
Joel Levin
Author of Tort Wars and of Marrano Justice
Joel Levin, Esq.
Levin & Associates Co., L.P.A.
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Empathy in the Context of Philosophy is a masterpiece of philosophical-historical scholarship, presenting a rich and comprehensive account of the explicit and implicit conceptions of empathy that have appeared in the course of Western thinking from Hume through contemporary phenomenologists, both philosophical and psychoanalytic. Agosta’s Heideggerian interpretation of empathy is truly a tour de force. In Being and Time Heidegger criticized traditional Cartesian conceptions of empathy and called for a “special hermeneutic of empathy,” presumably grounded in his analysis of existence, but he failed to offer such a hermeneutic himself. It is this missing hermeneutic of empathy that Agosta supplies, masterfully applying Heidegger’s modes of Dasein’s disclosedness to elucidate the design structure of empathic engagement, which Agosta rightfully claims constitutes the foundation of authentic relationality. This book will be an invaluable resource not only for scholars in philosophy and the human sciences, but for practitioners of psychoanalytic and humanistic psychotherapy as well.
–Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D. [Psychology], Ph.D. [Philosophy]
Author, Trauma and Human Existence (Routledge, 2007)
http://robertdstolorow.googlepages.com
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