James Alexander Jardine

PhD Student

Department of Media, Cognition and Communication
Njalsgade 140-142, 5th floor
2300 Copenhagen S

Office: KUA, 25.5.32
Phone: +45 353-28693
Phone (Reception desk): +45 353-28680
E-mail: pdr992@hum.ku.dk

Current Research Areas

Phenomenology and Empathy

Especially: G.W.F. Hegel; Edmund Husserl; Edith Stein; Jean-Paul Sartre; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Alfred Schutz; Paul Ricouer; Axel Honneth

Empathy and the Other

Especially: Alterity; Empathic Intentionality; Expression; Embodiment

Empathy and the Self

Especially: Recognition; Mutual Recognition; Love; Shame

Empathy and the Social World

Especially: Typification; Reification; Misrecognition; Invisibility

Current Project

James is currently completing his PhD at the Center, under the supervision of Dan Zahavi and Arne Grøn, the working title for his thesis being Empathy and Phenomenology: The Expressive Other, Recognition, and Reification. In short, his project aims to reconstruct a comprehensive phenomenology of empathy, a reconstruction which he currently envisages as having three main stages. First, drawing predominately on Husserl, Stein, and Merleau-Ponty, he will bring to light what phenomenology tells us of the experience of other subjects as other subjects incarnated within a body, in which that subjectivity is expressed. Second, he will try to show that a careful reading of the dynamics of recognitive (that is, and crudely put, socially mediated) self-experience studied by Hegel and Sartre may allow for a deeper phenomenological clarification of empathy. In other words, he will argue that the concept of empathy can be enriched by considering the experience of the self involved with and opened up by empathy, an experience which is not to be equated with the experience of the other, and he will take the Hegelian conception and analysis of recognition as instructive in this regard (without, of course, simply assuming that the two concepts of empathy and recognition should be taken as identical in meaning). Finally, taking influence from Schutz and Honneth, he will investigate what phenomenology informs us of the relationship between empathy (as elucidated in the previous chapters) and social engagements with a reified or anonymous character, in particular those brought about by wider social pressures. Of particular importance here will be the question of whether this relationship reveals anything essential about empathy itself. He hopes that this tripartite approach will also, if perhaps only in future work, mark out a perspective from which the relationship between, respectively; the phenomenology of intentionality opened up by Husserl; the dialectical phenomenology of Hegel and Sartre; and the social phenomenology undertaken by Schutz and implied by Honneth's work, may be assessed.