Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood

Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood
Author: Elisa Magrì
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2018-03-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3319710966

This book explores the phenomenological investigations of Edith Stein by critically contextualising her role within the phenomenological movement and assessing her accounts of empathy, sociality, and personhood. Despite the growing interest that surrounds contemporary research on empathy, Edith Stein’s phenomenological investigations have been largely neglected due to a historical tradition that tends to consider her either as Husserl’s assistant or as a martyr. However, in her phenomenological research, Edith Stein pursued critically the relation between phenomenology and psychology, focusing on the relation between affectivity, subjectivity, and personhood. Alongside phenomenologists like Max Scheler, Kurt Stavenhagen, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Stein developed Husserl’s method, incorporating several original modifications that are relevant for philosophy, phenomenology, and ethics. Drawing on recent debates on empathy, emotions, and collective intentionality as well as on original inquiries and interpretations, the collection articulates and develops new perspectives regarding Edith Stein’s phenomenology. The volume includes an appraisal of Stein’s philosophical relation to Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, and develops further the concepts of empathy, sociality, and personhood. These essays demonstrate the significance of Stein’s phenomenology for contemporary research on intentionality, emotions, and ethics. Gathering together contributions from young researchers and leading scholars in the fields of phenomenology, social ontology, and history of philosophy, this collection provides original views and critical discussions that will be of interest also for social philosophers and moral psychologists.

The Anthropology of Empathy

The Anthropology of Empathy
Author: Douglas W. Hollan
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2011-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857451030

Exploring the role of empathy in a variety of Pacific societies, this book is at the forefront of the latest anthropological research on empathy. It presents distinct articulations of many assumptions of contemporary philosophical, neurobiological, and social scientific treatments of the topic. The variations described in this book do not necessarily preclude the possibility of shared existential, biological, and social influences that give empathy a distinctly human cast, but they do provide an important ethnographic lens through which to examine the possibilities and limits of empathy in any given community of practice.

Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person

Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person
Author: James Jardine
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2022-02-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030844633

This text explores how self-consciousness and self-understanding differ phenomenologically from the experience and comprehension of others, and the extent to which such relations are constitutively interdependent. Jardine argues that Husserl’s analyses of selfhood and intersubjectivity are animated by the question of what's at stake in recognising an agent’s engagement as the situated response of a person, rather than simply as the comportment of an animal or living body. Drawing centrally from the freshly excavated Ideas II drafts and manuscripts, the author develops Husserl’s often fragmentary investigations of attention, habit, emotion, freedom, the common world, and action, and considers their implications for subjectivity and the experience of others. Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person also brings Husserlian phenomenology into dialogue with twenty-first century philosophical concerns, from accounts of selfhood and agency from analytic philosophy to the treatment of social experience in critical theory. The book shows the reader that transcendental phenomenology can be rejuvenated by engaging with a broader philosophical landscape and will appeal to researchers, students, and instructors in the field.

Edith Stein's On the Problem of Empathy

Edith Stein's On the Problem of Empathy
Author: Timothy A. Burns
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2024-05-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1666937177

Empathy (Einfühlung)—as a crucial concept for understanding ourselves, others, and communities—was a central topic of interest in the first half of the twentieth century amongst philosophers and in the emerging sciences of psychology and sociology. Edith Stein’s dissertation and inaugural publication, On the Problem of Empathy, introduces her unique take on empathy, embodiment, phenomenology, and intersubjectivity. Her immersion in phenomenology and her intimate familiarity with the psychology and sociology of her day make it a challenge for contemporary readers to understand. This companion provides a guide to Stein’s first philosophical masterpiece. The opening essays, including a contribution from Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, indicate the most important influences on Stein’s thought circa 1917, the structure and method of her argument, the place of this work in her oeuvre, its historical significance, and its relevance for contemporary philosophical discussions. Timothy Burns then provides a clear and detailed summary of each section of Empathy, elucidating the argument that weaves through this classic of philosophical thought.

Phenomenology of Sociality

Phenomenology of Sociality
Author: Thomas Szanto
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2015-11-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317420624

Phenomenological accounts of sociality in Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Scheler, Schütz, Stein and many others offer powerful lines of arguments to recast current, predominantly analytic, discussions on collective intentionality and social cognition. Against this background, the aim of this volume is to reevaluate, critically and in contemporary terms, the rich phenomenological resources regarding social reality: the interpersonal, collective and communal aspects of the life-world (Lebenswelt). Specifically, the book pursues three interrelated objectives: it aims 1.) to systematically explore the key phenomenological aspects of social reality; 2.) to offer novel, state-of-the-art assessments of both central and lesser-known proponents of the phenomenology of sociality (Gurwitsch, Löwith, von Hildebrand, or Walther), and 3.) to contextualize this elaborate body of work in light of contemporary social cognition research, the growing literature in analytic social ontology, and current trends in moral psychology, moral phenomenology, and social and political philosophy. The collection brings together original articles by a host of prominent scholars and upcoming young talents to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of the topic. It will be essential reading for those studying phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity, empathy, and community, including analytic, social, moral and political philosophers, and will also be of interest for social scientists and social psychologists.

The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition

The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition
Author: Kristin Gjesdal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 801
Release: 2024
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0190066237

This Oxford Handbook celebrates the work of trailblazing women in the history of modern philosophy. Through thirty-one original chapters, it engages with the work of women philosophers spanning the long nineteenth century in the German tradition, and covers women's contribution to major philosophical movements, including romanticism and idealism, socialism, and Marxism, Nietzscheanism, feminism, phenomenology, and neo-Kantianism. It opens with a section on figures, offering essays focused on fifteen thinkers in this tradition, before moving on to sections of essays on movement and topics. Across the volume's chapters, essays examine women's contributions to key philosophical areas such as epistemology and metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, ecology, education, and the philosophy of nature.

Rethinking Intentionality, Person and the Essence

Rethinking Intentionality, Person and the Essence
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2024-02-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004693610

What is the relationship between the concept of person and the concept of intentionality? Is the phenomenological notion of essence somehow related to that of medieval philosophies? What kind of entity is the person understood in her irreducible singularity? These are some of the questions that the chapters in this book seek to address and develop by focusing on the thought of Aquinas, Scotus and Edith Stein. Indeed, the editors of the book are led by the conviction that a fruitful dialogue between medieval philosophy and 20th century phenomenology may prove useful in addressing questions and problems that are still relevant in contemporary debates. The book is divided into three sections, devoted respectively to medieval philosophy, phenomenology and some of the possible systematic and historical intersections between them. Contributors are Sarah Borden Sharkey, Antonio Calcagno, Therese Cory, Daniele De Santis, Andrew LaZella, Dominik Perler, Giorgio Pini, Francesco Valerio Tommasi, Anna Tropia, and Ingrid Vendrell Ferran.

A Theology of Compassion

A Theology of Compassion
Author: Oliver Davies
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2016-08-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1532604734

The wholesale rejection of metaphysics today has become the test of the postmodern. In this groundbreaking volume Oliver Davies argues for a renewal of metaphysics, as the language of createdness, based not in a return to outmoded concepts of essence but in a dynamic new understanding of ontology as narrative and performance. This repairing of the Western metaphysical tradition is grounded both in the divine self-naming in Exodus--which, for the rabbis, identified God's presence in the world with God's compassionate acts--and in the compassionate resistance of Etty Hillesum and Edith Stein to the violence of the Holocaust. Building on a new metaphysics of compassion that is attentive to the histories of the contemporary world, Davies offers a renewed systematic theology of divine speech and relation, focused in Jesus Christ, who, as the triadic "Word" of God, speaks creatively at the heart of human culture and action and who, as the redeeming "Compassion" of God, regenerates the world.

The Philosophy of Edith Stein

The Philosophy of Edith Stein
Author: Antonio Calcagno
Publisher: Duquesne
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

For most philosophers, the work of Edith Stein continues to be eclipsed and relegated to obscurity. This work presents an excellent cross-section of Stein's writings and demonstrates the timeliness and relevance of her ideas for contemporary philosophical scholarship. Antonio Calcagno covers most of Edith Stein's philosophical life, from her early work with Husserl to her later encounters with medieval Christian thought, as well as a critical and analytical reading of major Steinian texts. Stein was an original thinker who challenged not only the direction in which Husserlian phenomenology was progressing but also sought to bring to philosophical light the relevance of certain key questions, including the meaning of what it is to be human, the relevance of metaphysics to science, and fundamental questions about the nature of God. Working to correct the perception that Stein is either an "unfaithful and distorting" phenomenologist or a pious Catholic mystic, Calcagno presents important work that has been neglected by both secular and religious scholars. The essays are not merely expository, but discuss the philosophical questions raised by Stein's work from a contemporary perspective, using Stein's original German texts. In its attention to the breadth and depth of Stein's philosophy from its initial development to its more mature form, The Philosophy of Edith Stein offers a new understanding of an individual who left behind an incredible philosophical and literary legacy worthy of scholarly attention. The book will be of interest not only to Stein scholars, but to feminists, phenomenologists, and Heideggerians.

Interpretation and Its Objects

Interpretation and Its Objects
Author: Andreea Deciu Ritivoi
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2003
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9401209324

This volume collects twenty-one original essays that discuss Michael Krausz’s distinctive and provocative contribution to the theory of interpretation. At the beginning of the book Krausz offers a synoptic review of his central claims, and he concludes with a substantive essay that replies to scholars from the United States, England, Germany, India, Japan, and Australia. Krausz’s philosophical work centers around a distinction that divides interpreters of cultural achievements into two groups. Singularists assume that for any object of interpretation only one single admissible interpretation can exist. Multiplists assume that for some objects of interpretation more than one interpretation is admissible. A central question concerns the ontological entanglements involved in interpretive activity. Domains of application include works of art and music, as well as literary, historical, legal and religious texts. Further topics include truth commissions, ethnocentrism and interpretations across cultures.