Nothwithstanding the critical result of this review (essay), Thomas Metzinger’s contribution to the rehabilitation of introspection and the phenomenology of experiential consciousness is substantial. The rehabilitation of introspection is critical path for my own work on empathy, since one approach to… Read More ›
Empathy
Empathy and the Emotions: Unexpressed Emotions are Incomplete…
Join me today for a conversation that engages the issue of how unexpressed emotions are incomplete. The emotions constitute information processing that operates in parallel with cognition (intelligence). Translation between these two differing systems occurs frequently, but emotions are not reducible… Read More ›
The Philosophical Significance of Neurology for Empathy – The Light Goes on!!!
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 ›
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 Disappearance and Rehabilitation of Introspection
Introspection extends from an attempt to isolate and report on an individual sensation such as the color or smell of a rose; to the account of a formal meditation or instructions on how to perform one, undertaken and published by… 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 ›
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 Analogy: Mindreading and Simulation
The argument of this post is that mindreading, theory of mind (“mentalizing”), and simulation theory are fundamentally flawed. What is lacking is empathy. It is not that these do not mention “empathy.” It occurs as both the target of explanation… Read More ›
