ABSTRACT
In ordinary parlance, empathy refers to our ability to feel with and be concerned about another person and her states of mind. Accordingly, empathy and related phenomena are of interest to philosophers and other researchers in a variety of different fields studying the human propensity to enter into and maintain interpersonal and social relationships. More specifically, in investigating how humans establish and maintain those relations, researchers have been focusing on empathy’s contribution to our capacity to know other persons’ states of mind, our tendency to normatively and morally evaluate and judge their character and actions, and our admittedly limited ability and willingness to help others in distress. Generally it is assumed that our ability to empathize with another person is based on or activated through our ability to imaginatively take up that person’s perspective. This assumption is also reflected in Mark Davis’s widely used questionnaire to measure a person’s disposition for empathy, where two of his subscales measure our disposition for “perspective taking” and for “fantasy” understood as “the tendency to imaginatively transpose oneself into fictional situations” (Davis 1994, 57). In the following three sections we will more closely analyze the concept of empathy, empathy’s contribution to social cognition and moral agency, and the question of how our empathic abilities are related to our imaginative capacities.
