I’m a philosopher who has spent much of the past 30 years writing about Adam Smith—widely considered one of the first theorists of empathy. One consequence of spending all that time on Smith is that I came to see how much empathy infused even his work on economics (he is for one thing the first theorist ever to write empathetically about the lives of the poor). I’ve become as a result something of a crusader on behalf of the importance of bringing empathy into social science and policy-making today. Understanding people’s perspectives from within is essential to figuring out who they are and what they need.
Many of us say that empathy is crucial to caring about other people and bridging divides between hostile groups. But others accuse it of reinforcing xenophobia: leading us to help only individuals we know. Who is right?Being Me Being Youargues that the answer to that question depends on what we think empathy is, and recommends the conception of it introduced by the philosopher and economist Adam Smith. Smith developed a conception of empathy by which it is a key component of what it is to be human. For Smith, however, empathy is also crucial to our having distinctive perspectives—to what today we call “diversity.” In a variety of ways, the book argues, Smithian empathy enables our differences and our shared humanity to come together.
I don’t read a lot of creative non-fiction, but I loved this one. It’s a collection of essays that recalls the best of Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe. Minutely observed, crisply written, and suffused with a wry humor, it’s as much fun as a good novel. And the first essay, toggling between the author’s experience as a medical actor (item 31 on the checklist for how medical students handle her supposed conditions: “Voiced empathy for my situation/problem”) and two real medical problems she faced, is all about empathy. Much of the rest of the book deals with empathy too, at least indirectly: in James Agee’s photographs, and in the way Jamison herself enters into the worldviews of drug dealers, extreme marathoners, and participants in a medical cult. But the first essay is squarely on the topic, and it’s fabulous.
From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014
Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade…
Can a book be a frenemy? I have a love/hate relationship with this one. Bloom presents the sharpest critique of empathy I’ve seen: empathy is terrible for our moral lives, according to him. I think he is quite wrong – much of my own book is devoted to refuting his – but his critique is important and he offers it up in a wonderfully clear and readable way.
In a divided world, empathy is not the solution, it is the problem; a source of prejudice, not kindness.
We think of empathy - the ability to feel the suffering of others for ourselves - as the ultimate source of all good behaviour. But while it inspires care and protection in personal relationships, it has the opposite effect in the wider world. As the latest research in psychology and neuroscience shows, we feel empathy most for those we find attractive and who seem similar to us and not at all for those who are different, distant or anonymous. Empathy therefore…
Yes, I know, this book has a long, very academic title. But it’s actually very short and clearly-written, explaining both to professionals and to laypeople why empathy is essential to writing good history. Kohut is a distinguished historian of modern Germany, who also has psychoanalytic training, and he makes a convincing case that we can properly understand even such horrific events as the Wannsee conference (which instituted the Nazis’ “final solution” to the problem of the Jews) only if we enter into the perspective of the people who attended it. This is an eye-opening book on an extremely important topic.
Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past is a comprehensive consideration of the role of empathy in historical knowledge, informed by the literature on empathy in fields including history, psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and sociology.
The book seeks to raise the consciousness of historians about empathy, by introducing them to the history of the concept and to its status in fields outside of history. It also seeks to raise the self-consciousness of historians about their use of empathy to know and understand past people. Defining empathy as thinking and feeling, as imagining, one's way inside the experience of…
I’m not much of an animal lover, but I found the insights into the lives of animals here really fascinating. Lori Gruen is an animal welfare activist as well as a philosopher, and she brings these capacities together in a wonderful exploration of the degree to which animals have empathy, or something like it, as well as the ways in which our extending empathy to animals can improve our ethical relationships with them. Gruen’s point is that empathy focuses us on others as distinctive individuals, with different perspectives and needs, rather than coming up with one-size-fits-all approaches to all members of a species. And she puts this point across in straightforward language and by way of many examples from her own experience.
In Entangled Empathy, scholar and activist Lori Gruen argues that rather than focusing on animal “rights,” we ought to work to make our relationships with animals right by empathetically responding to their needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and unique perspectives. Pointing out that we are already entangled in complex and life-altering relationships with other animals, Gruen guides readers through a new way of thinking about—and practicing—animal ethics. Gruen describes entangled empathy as a type of caring perception focused on attending to another’s experience of well-being. It is an experiential process involving a blend of emotion and cognition in which we…
This is one of the most imaginative, exciting, and accessible books of philosophy to appear in the past 25 years. Not all of it is about empathy, but one especially terrific chapter is. Fricker argues that we do people a “hermeneutical injustice” when our language and concepts leave no room for a ready way of understanding their experience (her example is how people responded to women who were sexually pressured in the workplace, before the phrase "sexual harrassment" was coined). And the cure for this problem, she says, is empathy: opening ourselves to the person telling us about their experience, and trying to feel our way into how they understood it, even if we are initially baffled by it.
In this exploration of new territory between ethics and epistemology, Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice, in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Justice is one of the oldest and most central themes in philosophy, but in order to reveal the ethical dimension of our epistemic practices the focus must shift to injustice. Fricker adjusts the philosophical lens so that we see through to the negative space that is epistemic injustice.
The book explores two different types of epistemic injustice, each driven by a form of prejudice, and from…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
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