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 ›
Empathy
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 ›
Empathy and Altruism: From Possibility to Implementation
The argument of today’s conversation is that empathy is required in order to get from the possibility of altruism to its implementation. A logical space is available to establish a link between empathy and the austere ethics of duty (“deontology”)…. Read More ›
