the word itself in English “empathy” was not invented until a Cornell University psychologist, Edward Bradford Titchner, was translating (1895) one of the innovators who are credited with founding psychology as a science, namely, Wilhelm Wundt – and Titchener invented the word “empathy” to translate the German “Einfühlung”.
By the end of George Makari’s engaging – indeed monumental – Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (W.W. Norton 2016: 652 pp.) one comes to understand that the modern mind is more ancient than most people believe and the… Read More ›
Kant famously asserted he was awakened from his “dogmatic slumbers” by studying Hume. This occurred not only in Kant’s theory of knowledge, but [arguably] also in taste, aesthetics, and the communicability of feelings. The “communicability of feelings” (1790/93a: 174; §40… Read More ›
Here is the short version of the short version: The deep, underground history of empathy is surfaced and reconstructed in Hume, Kant, Lipps, Freud, Scheler, Stein, and Husserl. A rumor of empathy is engaged in vicarious feeling, receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and… Read More ›
This post explores the parallel – the analogy – between empathy and taste. Such a parallel is justified by invoking the tradition in which empathy is made the basis of aesthetics. Instead of regarding this basis as a historical confusion, the… Read More ›
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 ›
Regarding skeptical doubts about the external world, Kant turns from the approach of dialectical illusion in the Dialectic to the Refutation of Idealism in the Analytic, missing an antinomy of Other Minds, which is considered here. Taking a clue from… Read More ›
Empathy Lessons 