Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives

Empathy has become a subject of intense disciplinary and interdisciplinary research in the last decade. There are primarily two reasons for this development, one is the research on other minds in philosophy and psychology, and the other is the empirical discovery of mirror neurons as a basis for social attunement and understanding of another being. The question of other minds is the problem of how we come to believe that others have minds like our own and how to justify this conviction. The discovery of mirror neurons has, on the other hand, led to numerous assumptions concerning the function and impact of these neurons as a neural foundation for the development of cooperation, as well as for the development of morality. But mirror neurons are also considered to be the basis for the human ability to display in our own brains the emotions, thoughts, and motives of other human beings, and there we are back at the question of other minds. After all these recent discussions it has nearly been forgotten that the term ‘empathy’ has a longer history of reception and influence in aesthetics and hermeneutics.