Dan Zahavi is a Professor in the Department of Media,
Cognition, and Communication at the University of Copenhagen, where he
specializes in the social dimension of self-experience; the nature of empathy
and its relevance for social cognition; the relation between phenomenology and
naturalism; selfhood and unity of consciousness with particular focus on
no-self doctrines. Dan is the director of the
Danish National Research Foundation’s Center for Subjectivity Research.
The center has a grant for an "Empathy
and Interpersonal Understanding" project that runs from 2011 to 2015.
The aim of the project is to contribute to investigate two questions:
1) What is empathy and what role does it play in interpersonal
understanding?
2) To what extent does interpersonal understanding presuppose a common
social and cultural background?
Dan
has written numerous articles on the nature of empathy and the center is
hosting workshops and conferences on the topic. One conference being held
in May 2013, is on the "Phenomenology
of Empathy". Sub Conference:
Science
1: Conflicting perspectives on self
2: Consciousness, self-consciousness, and selfhood
3: Transparency and anonymity
4: Subjectivity or selfhood
5: Self and diachronic unity
6: Pure and poor
7: A multidimensional account
Part II: Empathic Understanding
8: Subjectivity and intersubjectivity
9: Empathy and projection
10: Phenomenology of empathy
11: Empathy and social cognition
12: Subjectivity and otherness
Part II: The Interpersonal Self
13: The self as social object
14: Shame
15: You, me, and we
engagement and self-alienation
Dan Zahav at Institut für Philosophie Philosophisches Kolloquium
Sommersemester 2016
One of the central questions within contemporary debates about
collective
intentionality concerns the notion and status of the we. The question,
however,
is by no means new. At the beginning of the last century, it was already
intensively discussed in phenomenology. Whereas Heidegger argued that a
focus on empathy is detrimental to a proper understanding of the we, and
that
the latter is more fundamental than any dyadic interaction, other
phenomenologists, such as Stein, Walther and Husserl, insisted on the
importance of empathy for proper we-experiences. In my talk, I will
present
some of the key moves in this debate and then discuss and assess
Husserl’s
specific proposal.
: Dan Zah
Basic Empathy and
Complex Empathy.Emotion
Review4 (1):81-82.
(2012)
"Although there in recent years has been something of an upsurge of
interest in and work on empathy, there is still no clear consensus about
what precisely it is. Is empathy a question of sharing another’s
feelings, or caring about another, or being emotionally affected by
another’s experiences though not necessarily experiencing the same
experiences? Is it a question of imagining oneself in another’s
situation, or of imagining being another in that other’s situation, or
simply of making inferences about another’s mental states? People are
disagreeing about the role of sharing, and caring, and imagination in
empathy, just as they disagree about the relation between empathy and
social cognition in general, and about whether empathy is a unitary
phenomenon or a multidimensional construct."
Empathy, Embodiment And.
"When it comes to understanding the nature of social cognition, we have—
according to the standard view—a choice between the simulation theory,
the theory-theory or some hybrid between the two. The aim of this paper
is to argue that there are, in fact, other options available, and that
one such option has been articulated by various thinkers belonging to
the phenomenological tradition. More specifically, the paper will
contrast Lipps’ account of empathy—an account that has recently
undergone something of(...)"
Empathy and mirroring: Husserl and Gallese - Dan Zahavi
"The focus of my current contribution will be on Husserl’s theory of
empathy. My reason for choosing this topic is not merely a wish to fill
what some might see as a lacuna in my earlier work, but is also and
primarily motivated by the fact that there in recent years has been a
renewed interest in the topic. Interestingly, and perhaps also
slightly surprisingly, the impetus for this interest stems from
empirical research, and from the discovery of the so-called “mirror
neurons”, i.e., neurons which respond both when a particular motor
action, say grasping an object with the hand, is performed by the
subject and when the subject observes the same goal-directed action
performed by another individual."
2011 - Empathy
and Direct Social Perception: A Phenomenological Proposal.
Review of Philosophy and Psychology2
(3):541-558.
"Quite a number of the philosophical arguments and objections currently
being launched against simulation (ST) based and theory-theory (TT)
based approaches to mindreading have a phenomenological heritage in that
they draw on ideas found in the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty, Stein, Gurwitsch, Scheler and Schutz. Within the last
couple of years, a number of ST and TT proponents have started to react
and respond to what one for the sake of simplicity might call the
phenomenological proposal (PP). This paper addresses some of these
critical responses, and distinguishes—in the process—substantive
disagreements from terminological issues and other issues that are
symptomatic of different research agendas. It does so by focusing
specifically upon some objections made by Pierre Jacob. These epitomize
the kinds of concerns that are being raised about PP at the moment, and
thus facilitate a reply on behalf of PP that also applies more
generally"
2010 -"Empathy,
Embodiment and Interpersonal Understanding: From Lipps to Schutz Inquiry53/3,
2010, 285-306 "ABSTRACT When it comes to
understanding the nature of social cognition, we have
according to the standard view—a choice between the simulation
theory, the theory-theory or some hybrid between the two. The aim of
this paper is to argue that there are, in fact, other options
available, and that one such option has been articulated by various
thinkers belonging to the phenomenological tradition. More
specifically, the paper will contrast Lipps’ account of empathy—an
account that has recently undergone something of
a revival in the hands of contemporary simulationists—with various
accounts of empathy found in the phenomenological tradition. I
discuss the way Lipps was criticized by Scheler, Stein and Husserl,
and outline some of the core features of their, at times divergent,
alternatives. I then proceed by considering how their basic
take on empathy and social cognition was taken up and modified by
Schutz—a thinker whose contribution to the analysis of interpersonal
understanding has been unjustly neglected in recent years."
2007-
Expression and empathy." In D. Hutto & M. Ratcliffe (eds.):Folk
Psychology Reassessed.
Springer, 2007, 25-40.
"The ongoing debate about the nature of social cognition has been
dominated by two competing positions, the theory–theory of mind and the
simulation theory of mind. Although these positions are regularly
depicted as being quite divergent, I will in the following discuss what
I take to be a shared assumption, namely a certain conception of the
mind–body relation. I will criticize it and, drawing on thinkers like
Scheler, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, I will argue that our
understanding of others is crucially dependent on our
understanding of their expressive behaviour."
Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity
Drawing on the work of Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,
Husserl and Sartre, this article presents an overview of some of the
diverse approaches to intersubjectivity that can be found in the
phenomenological tradition. Starting with a brief description of
Scheler’s criticism of the argument from analogy, the article continues
by showing that the phenomenological analyses of intersubjectivity
involve much more than a ‘solution’ to the ‘traditional’ problem of
other minds. Intersubjectivity doesn’t merely concern concrete
face-to-face encounters between individuals. It is also something that
is at play in simple perception, in tool-use, in emotions, drives and
different types of self-awareness. Ultimately, the phenomenologists
would argue that a treatment of intersubjectivity requires a
simultaneous analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and
world. It is not possible simply to insert intersubjectivity somewhere
within an already established ontology; rather, the three regions
‘self’, ‘others’, and ‘world’ belong together; they reciprocally
illuminate one another, and can only be understood in their
interconnection