
Publication details
Publisher: Springer
Place: Berlin
Year: 2018
Pages: 301-321
Series: Continental Philosophy Review
Full citation:
, ""Seeing-in" and twofold empathic intentionality", Continental Philosophy Review 51 (3), 2018, pp. 301-321.


"Seeing-in" and twofold empathic intentionality
A Husserlian account
pp. 301-321
in: Continental Philosophy Review 51 (3), 2018.Abstract
In recent years, the phenomenological approach to empathy becomes increasingly influential in explaining social perception of other people. Yet, it leaves untouched a related and pivotal question concerning the unique and irreducible intentionality of empathy that constitutes the peculiarity of social perception. In this article, I focus on this problem by drawing upon Husserl's theory of image-consciousness, and I suggest that empathy is characterized by a "seeing-in" structure. I develop two theses so as to further explicate the seeing-in structure in question: first, empathy as a phenomenologically sui generis act is an intentional fusion of both presentation and re-presentation; and second, empathic intentionality is in essence twofold in that it is at once directed at both the other's sensuously given body and the other's non-sensuously given mentality. In this light, I argue that empathy is better conceived as a quasi-perceptual act that is fundamentally different from external perception simpliciter and other complex acts such as signitive, recollective and imaginative intention.
Cited authors
Publication details
Publisher: Springer
Place: Berlin
Year: 2018
Pages: 301-321
Series: Continental Philosophy Review
Full citation:
, ""Seeing-in" and twofold empathic intentionality", Continental Philosophy Review 51 (3), 2018, pp. 301-321.