Other Minds, Misc

Husserlian phenomenology, as the study of conscious experience, has often been accused of solipsism. Husserl’s method, it is argued, does not have the resources to provide an account of consciousness of other minds. This chapter will address this issue by providing a brief overview of the multiple angles from which Husserl approached the theme of intersubjectivity, with specific focus on the details of his account of the concrete interpersonal encounter – “empathy.” Husserl understood empathy as a direct, quasi-perceptual form of (...) intentionality through which the sense of the Other is constituted. Furthermore, his account of empathy is holistically integrated with his overall theory of intersubjectivity, including his discussions of the objectivity of nature, and the social, historical, and communal aspects of subjectivity. Husserl’s theory of empathy continues to cast a long shadow, influencing both the analytic and continental approaches to the problem of other minds, as well as contemporary account of social cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Experiences justify beliefs about our environment. Sometimes the justification is immediate: seeing a red light immediately justifies believing there is a red light. Other times the justification is mediate: seeing a red light justifies believing one should brake in a way that is mediated by background knowledge of traffic signals. How does this distinction map onto the distinction between what is and what isn't part of the content of experience? Epistemic egalitarians think that experiences immediately justify whatever is part of (...) their content. Epistemic elitists deny this and think that there is some further constraint the contents of experience must satisfy to be immediately justified. Here I defend epistemic elitism, propose a phenomenological account of what the further constraint is, and explore the resulting view's consequences for our knowledge of other minds, and in particular for perceptual theories of this knowledge. (shrink)

The act of mindreading has been recognized to have great moral and epistemic value. Unfortunately, psychological research has shown that we are naturally inaccurate at mindreading, which should worry us quite a bit. It has also been shown that when motivated to mindread well, subjects become more accurate. In this paper I argue that some kinds of artwork—specifically, those utilizing dramatic irony—can educate us as to how valuable accurate mindreading is and motivate us to try to mindread well. The primary (...) example I discuss is Alfred Hitchcock’s film Notorious. (shrink)

William james's views on the other minds problem are a serious lacuna in jamesian scholarship. this essay systematically collects together and examines his encounter with this problem. james consistently held to a teleological criterion for mindedness, which appeals to certain eidetic features which living things manifest. the essay also examines the implications of this view for james's ethical theory, especially his 'privacy defense' of democracy.

This book explores how we can measure consciousness. It clarifies what consciousness is, how it can be generated from a physical system, and how it can be measured. It also shows how conscious states can be expressed mathematically and how precise predictions can be made using data from neurophysiological studies.

I discussed the ways in which folk psychology is influenced by the need for small-scale cooperation between people. I argue that considerations about cooperation and mutual benefit can be found in the everyday concepts of belief, desire, and motivation. I describe what I call "solution thinking", where a person anticipates another person's actions by first determining the solution to the cooperative problem that the person faces and then reasoning backwards to a prediction of individual action.

In the article I discuss the conceptual problem of other minds and different approaches to mental concepts. Firstly, I introduce the conceptual problem and argue that solutions proposed by theory-theory and direct perception approach are inadequate. I claim that mental concepts are neither theoretical terms nor observational terms. Then, I consider third option which states that mental concepts are dispositional terms, i.e. they concern particular patterns (stereotypes) of behavior. Finally, I argue that dispositional approach is to some extent coherent with (...) phenomenological account and that phenomenological concept of embodiment can improve this position. (shrink)

This paper discusses whether other people’s mental states are, at times, perceivable. Against such a possibility it was objected that other people’s mental states are not empirically accessible and therefore, at best, recognizable by inference to the best explanation of their behaviour. However, this fairly common view is committed to a narrow empiricist concept of perception. Hence, this article explores a broader concept of perception and analyses its application-conditions with respect to the perception of other people’s mental states.

This essay offers a constructive criticism of Part I of Davis’ Meaning, Expression and Thought. After a brief exposition, in Sect. 2, of the main points of the theory that will concern us, I raise a challenge in Sect. 3 for the characterization of expression that is so central to his program. I argue first of all that a sincere expression of a thought, feeling, or mood shows it. Yet attention to this fact reveals that it does not go without (...) saying how it is possible to show such things as thoughts, feelings or moods; we need an account of how this is possible, and I offer a partial such account in Sect. 4. Second, much of the attraction of Davis’ program depends on its ability to explain how linguistic meaning can be arrived at without covertly presupposing linguistic conventions. This in turn depends, in Davis’ hands, upon the claim that it is possible to express any of a wide range of ideas in the absence of conventions. I argue in Sect. 5 that the account of showing at which we will by then have arrived makes clear that Davis needs, and lacks, an explanation of how it is possible to do this. (shrink)

I evaluate Kusch's arguments that everyday and scientific psychological beliefs are made true by the institutional facts about the people to whom they are applied. I conclude that institutional facts are among the truth-makers of such beliefs, and that this is a very significant point to have made, but that they are unlikely to be the sole such truth-makers.

This book examines autism from the tradition of analytic philosophy, working from the premise that Autism Spectrum Disorders raise interesting philosophical questions that need to be and can be addressed in a manner that is clear, jargon-free, and accessible. The goal of the original essays in this book is to provide a philosophically rich analysis of issues raised by autism and to afford dignity and respect to those impacted by autism by placing it at the center of the discussion.

Deleuze suggests that his work grounds a new conception of the Other–the Other as expression of a possible world, as a structure that precedes any subsequent dialectical mediation, including the master-slave dialectic of social relations. I will argue, however, that the ethico-political injunction that Deleuze derives from his analysis of the 'other-structure' confronts a different problem. It commits Deleuze to either tacitly prescribing a romantic morality of difference that valorizes expressive encounters without 'relations of explication' and any kind of pre-understanding (...) (embodied or otherwise), or his continual flirtations with a mystical 'going beyond' the other-structure must be more than mere flirtations. (shrink)

Although many cases of knowledge require careful, conscious deliberation, knowledge of other minds is different, for it requires in some sense that we not think too much about it. The primary way that we come to know what others are thinking is by interacting with them, and the interactive context requires real-time engagement such that conscious intellectual deliberation is disruptive in that it disturbs the flow of the interaction. Understanding that part of what we know when we know others comes (...) from nonpropositional, noncognitive know-how in a joint context can help elucidate the common wisdom behind the claims about how we should not overthink our interactions with other people. (shrink)

Much recent work on empathy in philosophy of mind and cognitive science has been guided by the assumption that minds are composed of intracranial phenomena, perceptually inaccessible and thus unobservable to everyone but their owners. I challenge this claim. I defend the view that at least some mental states and processes—or at least some parts of some mental states and processes—are at times visible, capable of being directly perceived by others. I further argue that, despite its initial implausibility, this view (...) receives robust support from several strands of empirical research. (shrink)

Many morally important facts about the way we affect one another, in particular the psychological damage we can inflict, are hard to imagine .

Mindreading (or folk psychology, Theory of Mind, mentalizing) is the capacity to represent and reason about others’ mental states. The Simulation Theory (ST) is one of the main approaches to mindreading. ST draws on the common-sense idea that we represent and reason about others’ mental states by putting ourselves in their shoes. More precisely, we typically arrive at representing others’ mental states by simulating their mental states in our own mind. This entry offers a detailed analysis of ST, considers theoretical (...) arguments and empirical data in favour of and against it, discusses its philosophical implications, and illustrates some alternatives to it. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has focused almost exclusively on propositional knowledge. This paper considers an underexplored area of epistemology, namely knowledge of persons: if propositional knowledge is a state of mind, consisting in a subject's attitude to a (true) proposition, the account developed here thinks of interpersonal knowledge as a state of minds, involving a subject's attitude to another (existing) subject. This kind of knowledge is distinct from propositional knowledge, but it exhibits a gradability characteristic of context-sensitivity, and admits of shifty thresholds. (...) It is supported by a wide range of unexplored linguistic data and intuitive cases; and it promises to illuminate debates within epistemology, philosophy of religion, and ethics. (shrink)

Lurz and Krachun propose a new experimental protocol designed to discriminate genuine mindreading animals from mere behavior-readers and to give evidence in favor of the claim that chimpanzees are capable of attributing internal goals to others. They suggest that chimpanzees' variety of "internal goal attribution" consists in attributing to others basic intentional representations, baptized by Millikan as "pushmi-pullyu representations". Now, Millikan distinguishes what I propose to call 'pure' PPs from more complex varieties of PPs, which allow their owners to respond (...) more flexibly to their environments. But, what would happen if we tried to differentiate, analogously, between more or less sophisticated mind-readers in virtue of the sorts of PPs that they could attribute to others? What would attributing complex PPs consist in and how would such capacity increase the predictive powers of chimpanzee mind-readers? This paper offers an answer to these questions. Based on Millikan's work, I differentiate two varieties of complex PPs. Then, I examine what a basic mind-reader, only capable of attributing 'pure' PPs, would be able to do. After that, I distinguish two more sophisticated varieties of mindreading, each consisting in the attribution of one of the complex PPs previously presented, and I show how the ability to attribute complex PPs to others comes with more potent and flexible capacities to anticipate their behavior. Finally, I offer some reasons to think that attributing complex PPs is still simpler than full-blown mindreading and I briefly evaluate the prospects of extending this proposal to infant social cognition. (shrink)

The paper investigates the acquisition of the semantics/pragmatics of two Modern Greek evidential markers taha (¿supposedly¿) and dithen (¿as if¿, ¿so-called¿) and possible correlations with children¿s mind-reading abilities. Between (a) an evidential¿ironical interpretation and (b) a pretence interpretation, earliest uses of these particles (in spontaneous children¿s speech) suggest that pretence-interpretations, rather than evidential ones, are the first to develop (Ifantidou, to appear). This production finding is mapped onto input occurrences of taha and dithen in (i) children¿s readers, (ii) adults¿ prose, (...) and (iii) adults¿ speech. High prevalence of pretence interpretations is observed in (i), with high prevalence of evidential interpretations in (ii) and (iii). These findings are cross-checked by linguistic tasks run with nursery (4¿5 years old) and 6¿12 year-old children. The results also point to an early acquisition of the pretence-interpretation and a later acquisition of the particles¿ evidential uses. Finally, non-linguistic experiments are run with the nursery (4¿5 year-old) children to assess their evidential cognitive abilities. Two questions arise: (1) If children lack the semantics/pragmatics of evidential taha and dithen, do they also lack the relevant mind-reading abilities? (2) If children exhibit an earlier working capacity of pretence-interpretations, is there an explanation for why this is so? In addressing these issues, I will explore the possibility that availability of evidential lexical items in language presupposes availability of relevant concepts, and suggest, in turn, a degree of developmental interdependence between cognition and language. (shrink)

Empathy has for a long time, at least since the eighteenth century, been seen as centrally important in relation to our capacity to gain a grasp of the content of other people's minds, and predict and explain what they will think, feel, and do; and in relation to our capacity to respond to others ethically. In addition, empathy is seen as having a central role in aesthetics, in the understanding of our engagement with works of art and with fictional characters. (...) A fuller understanding of empathy is now offered by the interaction of research in science and the humanities. This volume draws together nineteen original chapters by leading researchers across several disciplines, together with an extensive Introduction by the editors. The individual chapters reveal how important it is, in a wide range of fields of enquiry, to bring to bear an understanding of the role of empathy in its various guises. It offers the ideal starting-point for the exploration of this intriguing aspect of human life. (shrink)

Decety presents evidence for the claim that neural mechanisms involved in the generation of actions are also recruited in the observation and mental simulation of actions. This paper explores the relationship between such neuropsychological findings and our common-sense understanding of what it is for a person to imitate or imagine performing an action they have observed. A central question is whether imitation and imagination necessarily involve the ability to distinguish between one's own actions and those of others. It is argued (...) that certain imitative and imaginative capacities can be present, and play a key role in the acquisition of knowledge, even in the absence of an ability to distinguish between self and other in this way. (shrink)

Suggesting that phenomenology results in an “imperialism of the same” that considers the other only in terms of their effect upon the subject rather than in their genuine alterity, Levinas initiates a line of thought that can still be discerned in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Claude Lefort. However, this paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s work is capable of avoiding this line of criticism, and that his position is an important alternative to the more dominant Derridean and Levinasian conceptions of (...) alterity. Moreover, this essay will also extricate Merleau-Ponty from Levinas’ claim that his philosophy is “sustained by an unaccountable affection”. Rather than ignoring the alterity of the other, and also without presupposing some primordial affectionate bond with the other, Merleau-Ponty explicates an interesting conception of what responsibility towards the ‘otherness of the other’ should consist in. Basically, he insists upon the way in which self and other are always already intertwined together (or reversible), and suggests that respecting the alterity of the other should involve the imperative to further immerse oneself in this transformative bond – to transform what we think of as self, and also what we think of as ‘other’. (shrink)

Most people think of themselves as pretty good at understanding others’ beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions. Accurate mindreading is an impressive cognitive feat, and for this reason the philosophical literature on mindreading has focused exclusively on explaining such successes. However, as it turns out, we regularly make mindreading mistakes. Understanding when and how mind misreading occurs is crucial for a complete account of mindreading. In this paper, I examine the conditions under which mind misreading occurs. I argue that these patterns (...) of mind misreading shed light on the limits of mindreading, reveal new perspectives on how mindreading works, and have implications for social epistemology. (shrink)

Social cognition researchers have become increasingly interested in the ways that behavioral, physiological, and neural coupling facilitate social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We distinguish two ways of conceptualizing the role of such coupling processes in social cognition: strong and moderate interactionism. According to strong interactionism (SI), low-level coupling processes are alternatives to higher-level individual cognitive processes; the former at least sometimes render the latter superfluous. Moderate interactionism (MI) on the other hand, is an integrative approach. Its guiding assumption is that (...) higher-level cognitive processes are likely to have been shaped by the need to coordinate, modulate, and extract information from low-level coupling processes. In this paper, we present a case study on Möbius Syndrome (MS) in order to contrast SI and MI. We show how MS—a form of congenital bilateral facial paralysis—can be a fruitful source of insight for research exploring the relation between high-level cognition and low-level coupling. Lacking a capacity for facial expression, individuals with MS are deprived of a primary channel for gestural coupling. According to SI, they lack an essential enabling feature for social interaction and interpersonal understanding more generally and thus ought to exhibit severe deficits in these areas. We challenge SI’s prediction and show how MS cases offer compelling reasons for instead adopting MI’s pluralistic model of social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We conclude that investigations of coupling processes within social interaction should inform rather than marginalize or eliminate investigation of higher-level individual cognition. (shrink)

Proceeding from a distinction between imagining oneself in another person’s situation and imagining oneself being someone else, this article attempts to elucidate what the latter type of imagining consists in. Previous attempts at spelling out the phenomenon fail to properly account for the role of the self, or rather every individual’s unique point of view. An alternative view is presented, where the concept of imagining oneself being someone else is explained in terms of a distinction between and a co-running of (...) the imaginer’s own perspective and that of the target individual. It is further argued that while we can imagine about an individual without imagining her having any of her actual properties, to meaningfully imagine oneself being someone else the imaginer needs to ascribe at least some qualitative property to the target individual for the imaginative project to get off the ground. Finally, the concept of empathy is used to illustrate the analysis provided, and the imagining oneself being someone else is in turn used to cast light on what is to be understood as genuine empathy. (shrink)

This paper clarifies several sources of the epistemological confusion that currently characterize the field of clinical psychology. Using a constructivist framework, it is argued that much of this confusion can be traced to a traditional failure to distinguish among levels of analysis when evaluating and comparing clinical psychology theories. By recognizing certain distinctions among levels of analysis, it becomes clear that efforts to provide epistemological legitimacy for clinical psychology theories have often conflated not only theories with epistemology, but also epistemologies (...) that reside at different levels of analysis. Recognition of these distinctions also permits a more precise definition of the role for which the received view of a natural science epistemology and hermeneutics are competing. This role should be defined as a "superordinate" epistemology. It is demonstrated how this concept provides some of the terms necessary for settling the debate between advocates of the received view and advocates of hermeneutics. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Why are we conscious? What does consciousness enable us to do that cannot be done by zombies in the dark? This paper argues that introspective consciousness probably co-evolved as a "spandrel" along with our more useful ability to represent the mental states of other people. The first part of the paper defines and motivates a conception of consciousness as a kind of "double vision" – the perception of how things seem to us as well as what they are – along (...) lines recently explored by Peter Carruthers. The second part explains the basic socioepistemic function of consciousness and suggests an evolutionary pathway to this cognitive capacity that begins with predators and prey. The third part discusses the relevance of these considerations to the traditional problem of other minds. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the claim that testimony can serve as a basic source of knowledge of other people’s mental lives against the objection that testimonial knowledge presupposes knowledge of other people’s mental lives and therefore can’t be used to explain it.

Paul Churchland characterizes the "epistemological problem" in philosophy of mind as the problem "concerned with how we come to have knowledge of the internal activities of conscious, intelligent minds." This problem is itself divided into two separate, but related problems: (1) the problem of self-consciousness -- that of determining how one comes to have knowledge of one's own mental states, and (2) the problem of other minds -- that of explaining how one can ever come to know that something other (...) than oneself has a mind, i.e., is a thinking, feeling, conscious being. My primary aim is to examine and solve the problem of other minds. However, since Churchland contends that the problem of other minds is inextricably intertwined with the problem of self-consciousness, I examine this latter problem, as well. (shrink)

Intrigues: From Being to the Other examines the possibility of writing the other, explores whether an ethical writing that preserves the other as such is possible, and discusses what the implications are for an ethically inflected criticism. Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, whose works constitute the most thorough contemporary exploration of the question of the other and of its relation to writing, are the main focus of this study. The book's horizon is ethics in the Levinasian sense: the question of (...) the other, which, on the hither side of language understood as a system of signs and of representation, must be welcomed by language and preserved in its alterity. Martin Heidegger is an unavoidable reference, however. While it is true that for the German philosopher Being is an immanent production, his elucidation of a more essential understanding of Being entails a deconstruction of onto-theology, of the sign and the grammatical and logical determinations of language, all decisive starting points for both Levinas and Blanchot.At stake for both Levinas and Blanchot, then, is how to mark a nondiscursive excess within discourse without erasing or reducing it. How should one read and write the other in the same without reducing the other to the same?Critics in recent years have discussed an "ethical moment or turn" characterized by the other's irruption into the order of discourse. The other becomes a true crossroads of disciplines, since it affects several aspects of discourse: the constitution of the subject, the status of knowledge, the nature of representation, and what that representation represses (gender, power). Yet there has been a tendency to graft the other onto paradigms whose main purpose is to reassess questions of identity, fundamentally in terms of representation; the other thus loses some of its most crucial features.Through close readings of texts by Heidegger, Levinas, and Blanchot the book examines how the question of the other engages the very limits of philosophy, rationality, and power. (shrink)

Current theories of social cognition are mainly based on a representationalist view. Moreover, they focus on a rather sophisticated and limited aspect of understanding others, i.e. on how we predict and explain others’ behaviours through representing their mental states. Research into the ‘social brain’ has also favoured a third-person paradigm of social cognition as a passive observation of others’ behaviour, attributing it to an inferential, simulative or projective process in the individual brain. In this paper, we present a concept of (...) social understanding as an ongoing, dynamical process of participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation. This process may be described (1) from a dynamical agentive systems point of view as an interaction and coordination of two embodied agents; (2) from a phenomenological approach as a mutual incorporation, i.e. a process in which the lived bodies of both participants extend and form a common intercorporality. Intersubjectivity, it is argued, is not a solitary task of deciphering or simulating the movements of others but means entering a process of embodied interaction and generating common meaning through it. This approach will be further illustrated by an analysis of primary dyadic interaction in early childhood. (shrink)

While there is a great diversity of treatments of other minds and inter-subjectivity within both analytic and continental philosophy, this article specifies some of the core structural differences between these treatments. Although there is no canonical account of the problem of other minds that can be baldly stated and that is exhaustive of both traditions, the problem(s) of other minds can be loosely defined in family resemblances terms. It seems to have: (1) an epistemological dimension (How do we know that (...) others exist? Can we justifiably claim to know that they do?); (2) an ontological dimension that incorporates issues having to do with personal identity (What is the structure of our world such that inter-subjectivity is possible? What are the fundamental aspects of our relations to others? How do they impact upon our self-identity?); and (3) A conceptual dimension in that it depends on one's answer to the question what is a mind (How does the mind – or the concept of 'mind'– relate to the brain, the body and the world?). While these three issues are co-imbricated, I will claim that analytic engagements with the problem of other minds focus on (1), whereas continental philosophers focus far more on (2). In addition, this article will also point to various other downstream consequences of this, including the preoccupation with embodiment and forms of expressivism that feature heavily in various forms of continental philosophy, and which generally aim to ground our relations with others in a pre-reflective manner of inhabiting the world that is said to be the condition of reflection and knowledge. (shrink)

This article describes some of the main arguments for the existence of other minds, and intersubjectivity more generally, that depend upon a transcendental justification. This means that our focus will be largely on ‘continental’ philosophy, not only because of the abiding interest in this tradition in thematising intersubjectivity, but also because transcendental reasoning is close to ubiquitous in continental philosophy. Neither point holds for analytic philosophy. As such, this essay will introduce some of the important contributions of Edmund Husserl, Martin (...) Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Karl-Otto Apel, all of whom use transcendental reasoning as a key part of their analyses of intersubjectivity, and we also consider the work of Peter Strawson who does likewise in the analytic tradition. (shrink)

Abstract: One oft-cited feature of speech acts is their expressive character: Assertion expresses belief, apology regret, promise intention. Yet expression, or at least sincere expression, is as I argue a form of showing: A sincere expression shows whatever is the state that is the sincerity condition of the expressive act. How, then, can a speech act show a speaker's state of thought or feeling? To answer this question I consider three varieties of showing, and argue that only one of them (...) is suited to help us answer our question. I also argue that concepts from the evolutionary biology of communication provide one source of insight into how speech acts enable one to show, and thereby express, a psychological state. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre struggled for the whole of their philosophical careers against one of modern Western philosophy's most pervasive concepts, the Cartesian notion of self. A notion of self is always a complex of ideas; in the case of Beauvoir and Sartre it includes the ideas of embodiment, temporality, the Other, and intersubjectivity. This essay will show the considerable part that gender, especially Beauvoir's position as a woman in twentieth-century France, played in the development, presentation and reception (...) of the couple's alternative formulation. (shrink)

This paper reviews some of the arguments put forward by some psychologists in which they come to the conclusion that autistic individuals suffer from mindblindness, and also looks at one particular implication these sorts of individuals pose for Donald Davidson’s theory of radical interpretation. It has been claimed that a particular manifestation of mindblindness in autistic people serves as a counter example to claims Davidson has made about the relation between belief and intention in linguistic competence.

In this paper I argue that many of the core phenomenological insights, including the emphasis on direct perception, are a necessary but not sufficient condition for an adequate account of inter-subjectivity today. I take it that an adequate account of inter-subjectivity must involve substantial interaction with empirical studies, notwithstanding the putative methodological differences between phenomenological description and scientific explanation. As such, I will need to explicate what kind of phenomenology survives, and indeed, thrives, in a milieu that necessitates engagement with (...) the relevant sciences, albeit not necessarily deference to them. -/- There will be two central aims to this paper: 1. to defend the centrality and vitality of phenomenological treatments of inter-subjectivity via a consideration of some remarks in Sartre - which I do think possess a non-trivial unity amongst the various interlocutors - and the manner in which they in fact serve to provide the basis for a better explanation of an array of empirical data than existing inferentialist or mindreading accounts of social cognition (notably Theory Theory, Simulation Theory, and hybrid versions); 2. to offer the methodological resources for renewing phenomenology in a manner that acknowledges ostensibly non-phenomenological moments in theory production - which involve explanation, inference to the best explanation, etc. - but does not abandon phenomenology for all that, allowing it to be simply absorbed into empirical explanation or other forms of philosophical analysis without remainder. (shrink)

In contemporary Western analytic philosophy, the classic analogical argument explaining our knowledge of other minds has been rejected. But at least three alternative positive theories of our knowledge of the second person have been formulated: the theory-theory, the simulation theory and the theory of direct empathy. After sketching out the problems faced by these accounts of the ego’s access to the contents of the mind of a “second ego”, this paper tries to recreate one argument given by Abhinavagupta (Shaiva philosopher (...) of recognition) to the effect that even in another’s body, one must feel and recognize one’s own self, if one is able to address that embodied person as a “you”. The otherness of You does not take away from its subjectivity. In that sense, just as every second person to whom one could speak is, first, a person, she is also a first person. Even as I regret that I do not know exactly how some other person is feeling right now, I must have some general access to the subjective experience of that other person, for otherwise what is it that I feel so painfully ignorant about? My subjective world is mine only to the extent that I recognize its continuity with a sharable subjective world where other I-s can make a You out of me. (shrink)

Empathy as “Feelingly Grasping” Perhaps the central question concerning empathy is if and if so how it combines aspects of thinking and feeling. Indeed, the intellectual tradition of the past centuries has been marked by a dualism. Roughly speaking, there have been two pathways when it comes to understanding each other: 1) thinking or mind reading and 2) feeling or empathy. Nonetheless, one of the ongoing debates in psychology and philosophy concerns the question whether these two abilities, namely, understanding what (...) the other is thinking and “understanding” what the other is feeling, are separate or not. Most of the authors in this volume consider the cognitive and affective dimensions at work within empathy. Each author does this within and beyond their own field. Coming from the humanities, we propose the following definition for empathy: Empathy is a social feeling that consists in feelingly grasping or retracing the present, future, or past emotional state of the other; thus empathy is also called a vicarious emotion. We would like to highlight two aspects of this definition in particular: 1.) the peculiar position of “grasping” which involves a cognitive dimension and 2.) the social dimensions of relating to the emotions of another human being. (shrink)