Psychopath and Narcissist Survivors Support Group

samvaknin · Joined: 15 Feb 2007 Posts: 2015

Empathy and Personality Disorders - click on this link:

http://samvak.tripod.com/personalitydisorders68.html

On Empathy

http://samvak.tripod.com/empathy.html

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http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy/

Empathy
First published Mon 31 Mar, 2008
Despite its linguistic roots in ancient Greek, the concept of empathy is of recent intellectual heritage. Yet its history has been varied and colorful, a fact that is also mirrored in the multiplicity of definitions associated with the empathy concept in a number of different scientific and non-scientific discourses. In its philosophical heyday at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, empathy had been hailed as the primary means for gaining knowledge of other minds and as the method uniquely suited for the human sciences, only to be almost entirely neglected philosophically for the rest of the century. Only recently have philosophers become again interested in empathy in light of the debate about our folk psychological mindreading capacities. In the second half of the last century, the task of addressing empathy was mainly left to psychologists who thematized it as a psychological phenomenon and process to be studied by the method of the empirical sciences. Particularly, it has been studied by social psychologists as a phenomenon assumed to be causally involved in creating prosocial attitudes and behavior. Nevertheless, within psychology it is at times difficult to find agreement of how exactly one should understand empathy; a fact of which psychologists themselves have become increasingly aware. The purpose of this entry is to clarify the concept of empathy by surveying its history in various philosophical and psychological discussions and by indicating why empathy was and should be regarded to be of such central importance in understanding human agency in ordinary contexts, in the human sciences and for the constitution of ourselves as social and moral agents.

a.. 1. Historical Introduction
b.. 2. Empathy and the Philosophical Problem of Other Minds
a.. 2.1 Mirror Neurons, Simulation, and the Philosophical Revival of Empathy
c.. 3. Empathy as the Unique Method of the Human Sciences
a.. 3.1. The Critique of Empathy in the Context of a Hermeneutic Conception of the Human Sciences
b.. 3.2. The Critique of Empathy within the Context of a Naturalist Conception of the Human Sciences
d.. 4. Empathy as a Topic of Scientific Exploration in Psychology
e.. 5. Empathy and Moral Psychology
a.. 5.1. Empathy and Altruistic Motivation
b.. 5.2. Empathy, Moral Development, and Moral Agency
f.. 6. Conclusion
g.. Bibliography
h.. Other Internet Resources
i.. Related Entries