Empathy, Personhood, and Recognition

Treatments of interpersonality and intersubjectivity in the phenomenological tradition have unanimously rejected the notion that understanding and relating to other minds and persons is most fundamentally a matter of inference, inner simulation, or projection. More positively, phenomenologists have classically attempted to identify a form of experience, empathy, in which other embodied minds are directly grasped as such, and which more complex and cognitive forms of intersubjectivity take as their point of departure. One of the driving aims of this project is to clarify the phenomenological structure of such other-directed intentionality, and to assess the role it plays in interpersonal understanding.

A further dimension of my research is to consider the implications of empathy for how we ought to conceive of the self. Does the insight that subjectivity can be experienced in a second-personal manner prove that the self is something fundamentally relational, and should this lead us to abandon the thought that selfhood is fundamentally tied to the first-personal givenness of experience? My working hypothesis is that, when properly understood, the phenomenological notion of the person permits a conception of the self which is both inherently social and remains tied to an experiential life. Within this context, I am also interested in determining whether such phenomenological considerations might help in clarifying and assessing a conception of mutual recognition as something inseparable from selfhood, normativity, and agency.

Contact

For further information, please contact:

James Jardine
PhD Fellow
Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen
Njalsgade 140-142, Building 25, 5th floor
2300 Copenhagen S
Office: KUA, 25.5.32
Phone: +45 353-28693
E-mail: pdr992@hum.ku.dk
Webpage: https://ku-dk.academia.edu/JamesJardine