Levels of Empathy – Primary, Extended, and Reiterated Empathy

Abstract

About a century after it was first introduced, the notion of empathy has raised a widely ramified debate on how it should be defined, understood, and explained. Coined by the philosopher Robert Vischer (1872), the original German term Einfühlung was meant to denote a special kind of aesthetic perception. Theodor Lipps (1906) then transferred it into the field of social cognition where it was translated as " empathy " by the American psychologist Edward Titchener (1909). It is now used to designate our basic capacity to recognize and understand others as minded and expressive creatures. However, the nature of this capacity is still far from being unanimously conceived. One of the main reasons for this dissent may be seen in the Cartesian framework from which the debate took its origin. Up to now, the dominant theories of intersub-jectivity have conceived of the mental as an inner realm separated from others by an epistemic gulf that can only be crossed by inference or projection. Since the mind is not visible in the body, we are, according