Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art
Language
EnglishAbstract
This volume critically discusses the role empathy plays in different processes of understanding. More precisely, it clarifies empathy’s role in interpersonal understanding and appreciating works of literature and art. The volume also includes a section on historical theories of empathy’s role in understanding.
When it comes to understanding other persons, empathy is typically seen as a process that enables the empathizer to recognize a target person’s mental states, a process which is in turn seen as “understanding” this person. This volume, however, explores empathy’s role in understanding beyond mere mental state recognition. With contributions on processes of interpersonal understanding and understanding of literature and art, it provides readers with an overview over both differences and similarities regarding empathy’s epistemic role in two rather different areas. Since important roots of the debate about empathic understanding lie at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the historical section of the volume focusses specifically on this period.
Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, aesthetics and the history of philosophy, as well as in literary studies and art history.
Keywords
Christiana Werner;empathic understanding;empathy;experiential intelligibility;fiction;Iris Murdoch;interaction;interpersonal understanding;mental state;narrative immersion;philosophy of literature;social perception;Thomas Petraschka;testimony;understandingDOI
10.4324/9781003333739ISBN
9781032367781, 9781032367767, 9781003333739, 9781000960372Publisher
Taylor & FrancisPublisher website
https://taylorandfrancis.com/Publication date and place
2024Imprint
RoutledgeSeries
Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy,Classification
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy: aesthetics