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(2014) Self and other, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Empathy and social cognition

Dan Zahavi

pp. 153-187

This chapter elaborates the phenomenological account of empathy further by discussing and assessing a number of objections it has recently encountered. What does it mean to say that empathy provides direct access to the minds of others, and to what extent is such a claim compatible with the idea that social understanding is always contextual? To what extent does insistence on the experiential accessibility of other minds commit one to an untenable form of behaviourism? And to what extent is the phenomenological proposal really distinct from existing theory-theory-based accounts of social cognition? The chapter also discusses whether the phenomenological analyses might be in line with recent findings concerning primitive mirror-neuron-based forms of social understanding

Publication details

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199590681.003.0011

Full citation:

Zahavi, D. (2014). Empathy and social cognition, in Self and other, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 153-187.

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