Chapters in Edited Volumes
Ansell-Pearson, Keith and James, David (Eds.) (Forthcoming) The Empathetic Emotions in the History of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2025
According to a prominent view, empathising with another person is essentially a question of imagi... more According to a prominent view, empathising with another person is essentially a question of imaginatively emulating their perspectival experience. So conceived, engaging in empathy comprises an effort to inwardly imitate the character and context of another’s state of mind. This idea can be traced back to the seminal writings of Theodor Lipps, and a central ambition of the treatment of empathy developed by Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein during the first decades of the 20th Century – partially in reaction to Lipps – was to demonstrate its shortcomings and outline a credible alternative. My aim in this chapter is to demonstrate the pertinence of the early phenomenologists’ reflections for ongoing debates around empathy and imagination. In particular, I will argue that their account harbours valuable resources for responding to Peter Goldie’s multifaceted and critical analysis concerning the prospects of employing imaginative pretence to empathetically relive the mental lives of others. As I hope to demonstrate, while the early phenomenologists clearly distinguish the two accomplishments, they also provide a compelling account of the role imaginative pretence can play in enriching and broadening our empathy into others.
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Kronfeldner, Maria (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization, London, New York: Routledge., 2021
Sara Heinämaa and James Jardine demonstrate that both classical and existential phenomenology off... more Sara Heinämaa and James Jardine demonstrate that both classical and existential phenomenology offer analytical concepts that are of crucial pertinence and value to contemporary dehumanization research. They begin by outlining a general account of dehumanization that distinguishes it both from the general operation of objectification and from the violation of autonomy. Rather, they argue, what is essential to dehumanizing acts and practices is a disregard for, and undermining of, the unique singularity of human persons. Moreover, it is proposed that dehumanization ought to be theorized as an intersubjective process that also incorporates how the dehumanizing activity is experienced by the person dehumanized. Two concrete cases of dehumanizing treatment are then discussed in detail: colonial racism and gender hierarchization. The analytical concepts of inferiorization, epidermalization, and emotive projection are introduced to account for some of the specific features of these varieties of dehumanization. The Chapter thus argues that dehumanization is not one unified phenomenon but a pattern of social dynamics that emerges in different guises as relative to specific practical and historical contexts.
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Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Sciences, 2020
The unsettling, humiliating, and often threatening experience of feeling oneself 'invisible' befo... more The unsettling, humiliating, and often threatening experience of feeling oneself 'invisible' before the gazes of other people in one's social world has obvious potential as a theme for collaborative efforts between social theorists and phenomenologists. This chapter proposes one way of approaching such an engagement, drawing in particular upon three authors who offer detailed analyses of social visibility and its potential pathologies: Axel Honneth, Frantz Fanon, and Edmund Husserl. The specific phenomenon is first located by way of Honneth's treatment of social invisibility as frequented by behaviour that expresses an attitude of nonrecognition towards other persons immediately present. Drawing from Fanon (and others), it is then argued that Honneth's generally perceptive analysis, by focussing primarily on cases involving the seeming absence of all emotive recognition, underestimates the role of certain (dehumanizing) emotional responses in conveying to persons their 'invisibility.' While the exact relationships holding between perception and affect remain largely unexplored in Honneth's work, the chapter goes on to consider these relationships phenomenologically by drawing upon Husserl's unpublished writings on emotion and social experience. Moreover, it is suggested that the form of nonrecognition involved with social invisibility can be understood as a manifestation of a broader danger implicit within affective life, that is termed 'emotional blindness'. Briefly put, it is proposed that the 'invisibilizing gaze' manifests an affective response that, while sometimes partially co-responsive to social perception and understanding, is contaminated with associative configurations that lead our feelings astray.
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The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion, 2020
While Husserl is widely recognised as the founder of the phenomenological movement, and as respon... more While Husserl is widely recognised as the founder of the phenomenological movement, and as responsible for important positions on a number of central philosophical topics (such as, for instance, perception, intentionality, self-consciousness, and the tenability of naturalism), he is frequently regarded, even within phenomenological circles, as having a fairly impoverished understanding of the emotions. And indeed, there is some validity to the observation that, while essential roles are accorded to emotion in Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of personhood, (axiological) reason, value-theory, and ethics (to name just a few examples), it emerges less frequently in his writings as a central theme of inquiry. The following chapter offers the reader an opportunity to reconsider such an assessment, by highlighting and explicating a number of key claims that emerge in those writings where Husserl deals directly and thematically with the phenomenology of emotional life. Focussing mainly on his most productive and significant period as a phenomenologist of the emotions—dating between the publication of Logical Investigations in 1900 and Ideas I in 1913—I hope to indicate that Husserl’s published and unpublished writings contain important contributions to the phenomenological study of emotional life, and to our understanding of the emotions more broadly.
Published in: T. Szanto & H. Landweer (Eds.) (2020). The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion. London, New York: Routledge.
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Journal Articles
Metodo
This article explores the affinity between Axel Honneth's conception of elementary recognition an... more This article explores the affinity between Axel Honneth's conception of elementary recognition and Edmund Husserl's work on empathy, with the aim of indicating one way in which phenomenological analysis might contribute to critical social theory. I begin by sketching the 'two-level' account of recognition developed by Honneth in recent writings, which distinguishes between 'elementary' and 'normatively substantial' forms of recognition. The remainder of the paper then seeks to offer a deeper account of elementary recognition by identifying it with Husserl's conception of empathetic perception. I begin by clarifying what Husserl means by 'the person,' before illuminating the sense in which empathy counts as a distinctive kind of perceptual recognition of other personal selves, and shedding phenomenological light on empathy as a sui generis mode of interpersonal intentionality. I then conclude with some preliminary remarks regarding the relationship between empathetic perception and other forms of interpersonal responsiveness and recognition.
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Human Studies
My aim in this paper is to make use of Edith Stein’s phenomenological analyses of empathy, emotio... more My aim in this paper is to make use of Edith Stein’s phenomenological analyses of empathy, emotion, and personhood to clarify and critically assess the recent suggestion by Axel Honneth that a basic form of recognition is affective in nature. I will begin by considering Honneth’s own presentation of this claim in his discussion of the role of affect in recognitive gestures, as well as in his notion of ‘elementary recognition,’ arguing that while his account contains much of value it also generates problems. On the basis of this analysis, I will try to show that Stein’s account of empathy demarcates an elementary form of recognition in a less problematic fashion than does Honneth’s own treatment of this issue. I will then spell out the consequences of this move for the emotional recognition thesis, arguing that Stein’s treatment lends it further credence, before ending with some remarks on the connection between recognition and emotional personality.
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Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Jun 2016
Within the phenomenological tradition, one frequently finds the bold claim that interpersonal und... more Within the phenomenological tradition, one frequently finds the bold claim that interpersonal understanding is rooted in a sui generis form of intentional experience, most commonly labelled empathy (Einfühlung). The following paper explores this claim, emphasizing its distinctive character, and examining the phenomenological considerations offered in its defence by two of its main proponents, Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein. Having offered in section 2 some preliminary indications of how empathy should be understood, I then turn to some characterizations of its distinctive structure, considering, in section 3, the Husserlian claim that certain forms of empathy are perceptual in nature, and in section 4, Stein's insistence that empathetic experience frequently involves expli-cating the other's own intentional experiences. Section 5 will conclude by assessing the extent to which their analyses lend support to a conception of empathy as an intuitive experience of other minds.
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Edited Journal Issues
Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy. Vol. 5. No. 1, 2017
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Introduction to Edited Volume
Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences., 2020
Introduction
[In the gaze] …. 'the other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I tr... more Introduction
[In the gaze] …. 'the other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact, the other’s gaze transforms me into an object and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s'.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception.
Merleau-Ponty here responds to the pessimistic and reductive Sartrean account of the Gaze, highlighting that this objectifying gaze only becomes possible by withdrawing into our thinking nature. The capacity to detach and compartmentalize our manner of engagement with others, becoming empathically unavailable, closing down affective responsiveness, can serve positive ends as with certain occupations such as bomb disposal and surgery. Outside circumstances such as these, however, empathic unavailability may facilitate violence, negligence and ethical failure. It remains contentious, nonetheless, whether empathic responsiveness is ontologically basic and whether it is essential for ethics. What is clear is that primary empathy drives psycho-social development and serves as an affective and ethical touchstone for the more cognitive modes of intersubjective engagement and for metadiscursive practices, ensuring that subjects are able to sustain positive connections with others and the shared world.
Merleau-Ponty’s inhuman gaze both ‘animalizes’ the ‘object’ of the gaze but paradoxically requires a ‘rational’ retreat, effectively ‘de-animalizing’ the gazing subject .......
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Published in: T. Szanto & H. Landweer (Eds.) (2020). The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion. London, New York: Routledge.
[In the gaze] …. 'the other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact, the other’s gaze transforms me into an object and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s'.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception.
Merleau-Ponty here responds to the pessimistic and reductive Sartrean account of the Gaze, highlighting that this objectifying gaze only becomes possible by withdrawing into our thinking nature. The capacity to detach and compartmentalize our manner of engagement with others, becoming empathically unavailable, closing down affective responsiveness, can serve positive ends as with certain occupations such as bomb disposal and surgery. Outside circumstances such as these, however, empathic unavailability may facilitate violence, negligence and ethical failure. It remains contentious, nonetheless, whether empathic responsiveness is ontologically basic and whether it is essential for ethics. What is clear is that primary empathy drives psycho-social development and serves as an affective and ethical touchstone for the more cognitive modes of intersubjective engagement and for metadiscursive practices, ensuring that subjects are able to sustain positive connections with others and the shared world.
Merleau-Ponty’s inhuman gaze both ‘animalizes’ the ‘object’ of the gaze but paradoxically requires a ‘rational’ retreat, effectively ‘de-animalizing’ the gazing subject .......
Published in: T. Szanto & H. Landweer (Eds.) (2020). The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion. London, New York: Routledge.
[In the gaze] …. 'the other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact, the other’s gaze transforms me into an object and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s'.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception.
Merleau-Ponty here responds to the pessimistic and reductive Sartrean account of the Gaze, highlighting that this objectifying gaze only becomes possible by withdrawing into our thinking nature. The capacity to detach and compartmentalize our manner of engagement with others, becoming empathically unavailable, closing down affective responsiveness, can serve positive ends as with certain occupations such as bomb disposal and surgery. Outside circumstances such as these, however, empathic unavailability may facilitate violence, negligence and ethical failure. It remains contentious, nonetheless, whether empathic responsiveness is ontologically basic and whether it is essential for ethics. What is clear is that primary empathy drives psycho-social development and serves as an affective and ethical touchstone for the more cognitive modes of intersubjective engagement and for metadiscursive practices, ensuring that subjects are able to sustain positive connections with others and the shared world.
Merleau-Ponty’s inhuman gaze both ‘animalizes’ the ‘object’ of the gaze but paradoxically requires a ‘rational’ retreat, effectively ‘de-animalizing’ the gazing subject .......