A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy

You don't need a philosopher to tell you what empathy is; you need a philosopher to help you distinguish the hype and the over-intellectualization from a rigorous and critical empathy. In this volume, Lou Agosta engages thirty-three key articles from the great contributors to empathy studies such as William Ickes, Shaun Gallagher, and Dan Zahavi and the soon to be greats such as Eileen John, Adam Morton, and Matthew Ratcliffe. Agosta distinguishes the hype from the substance, the wheat from the chafe, and the breakdowns of empathy from a rigorous and critical empathy itself as the foundation of community. This volume engages with the key issues of the methods of accessing empathy (social psychology, phenomenology, neural science, critical practice), the history of concept empathy (not merely the word), the intersection of aesthetic empathy with cognitive and affective empathy, empathy and ethics, empathy and biology (mirror neurons, evolution), empathy in the arts (painting, film, music, literary fiction), and radical empathy (in cross cultural studies, major mental illness, and Eastern spiritual disciplines).This is not a survey but a critical engagement with key thinkers and their publications, designed to create a context for a conversation about how to make a difference in the individual and community by expanding empathy. The result is a rigorous and critical empathy that carries the struggle against over-intellectualism to the ivory tower of social psychologism. After debunking the prevailing scientism of empathy, this volume lays out a rigorous and critical empathy, leading the way forward with empathy studies that actually enable us to relate to one another. Every parent, teacher, health care worker, business person with customers, and professional with clients, knows what empathy is: Be open to the other person's feelings, take a walk in their shoes, give them back their own experience in one's own words such that they recognize it as theirs. So if this is the age of empathy, why is empathy in such short supply? Because we are mistaking the breakdowns of empathy - emotional contagion, conformity, projection, gossip, and getting lost in translation - for authentic empathic being with one another in community. Drive out cynicism, shame, resignation, bullying, and empathy naturally shows up. There is enough empathy to go around. Get some here.