Online/OPEN ACCESS: new article for the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology by Corijn van Mazijk (University of Groningen).
Corijn van Mazijk – “Husserl’s Layered Theory of Empathy and Theory of Mind”
JBSP (Received 01 Feb 2024, Accepted 03 Aug 2024, Published online: 18 Sep 2024). OPEN ACCESS.
Abstract: The ability to understand other minds is key to communication, social organization, and culture, and actively researched in disciplines such as psychology, ethology, and primatology. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) developed an elaborate theory of how we understand others, then commonly referred to as empathy (Theorie der Einfühlung). Much recent work on Husserl’s theory has interpreted him in opposition to Theory of Mind (ToM), but Husserl’s layered account of empathy has received little attention, and so have the more recent versions of ToM, which work with orders of intentionality, and which are applied widely in social cognition research today. This article focuses on Husserl’s layered approach, highlighting the main takeaways of his theory, while also providing a commentary, which reflects on his work from a contemporary perspective. This yields a rather different interpretation of him, one which reveals hitherto unnoticed connections with diverse areas of social cognition scholarship.
Full article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2024.2391880 (OPEN ACCESS)
Corijn van Mazijk, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands
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