Empathy, Expansionism, and the Extended Mind

Abstract

This chapter advances a definition of empathy as *other-focussed personal imagining,* a definition which at once distinguishes empathy from various lower-level phenomena such as affective mimicry and emotional contagion, and specifies the relationship between such processes and fully-fledged empathy. This account of empathy is then contextualized and developed further in relation to two other recent proposals. The theory of the *extended mind* stresses the way in which the human mind amplifies its capacities by the exploiting the world beyond the physical boundaries of the body; empathy may be both a mechanism and a beneficiary of such extension, its power being enhanced through the practice of narration. The theory of *expanded cognition* lays a related emphasis on the way in which everyday perceptual and cognitive routines are often stretched in the context of art; the scope and intensity of empathy may be expanded by narrative artworks in just this way.