Hostname: page-component-6587cd75c8-2cm9h Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-24T01:47:57.317Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Introduction: Emotion and the Sciences: Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art, and History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Susan Lanzoni
Susan Lanzoni*
Affiliation:
Division of Continuing Education, Harvard University E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Emotion and feeling have only in the last decade become analytic concepts in the humanities, reflected in what some have called an “affective turn” in the academy at large. The study of emotion has also found a place in science studies and the history and philosophy of science, accompanied by the recognition that even the history of objectivity depends in a dialectical fashion on a history of subjectivity (Daston and Galison 2010, esp. chap. 4). This topical issue is a contribution to this larger trend across the humanities and the history of science, and yet is circumscribed by attention to a particular kind of emotion or condition for feeling: one centered not in an individual body, but in the interstices between bodies and things, between selves and others – what we call empathy.

Type
Introduction
Information
Science in Context , Volume 25 , Issue 3: The Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art, and History , September 2012 , pp. 287 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Alberti, Fay Bound, ed. 2006. Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700–1950. New York: Pallgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alexander, Zeynep Çelik. 2010 “Metrics of Experience: August Endell's Phenomenology of Architecture.” Grey Room (40):50–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allesch, Christian G. 1987. Geschichte der psychologischen Aesthetik.Untersuchungen zur historischen Entwicklung eines psychologischen Verständnisses ästhetischer Phänomene. Göttingen: C. J. Hogrefe.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken.Google Scholar
Blakeslee, Sandra. 2006. “Cells that Read Minds.” New York Times, January 10.Google Scholar
Bourke, Joanna. 2003. “Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History.” History Workshop Journal 55:111–133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brecht, Bertolt. [1932] 1992. “Indirect Impact of the Epic Theatre (extracts from the Notes to Die Mutter).” In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited by Willet, John, 57–62. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Brooks, David. 2011. “The Limits of Empathy.” New York Times, September 29.Google Scholar
Brothers, Leslie. 1989. “A Biological Perspective on Empathy.” American Journal of Psychiatry 146 (1):10–19.Google ScholarPubMed
Bruner, Jerome and Kalmar., D. A. 1998. “Narrative and Metanarrative in the Construction of Self.” In Self-Awareness: Its Nature and Development, edited by Ferrari, Michel and Sternberg, Robert J., 308–331. New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Clough, Patricia Ticento and Halley, Jean, eds. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Connolly, William E. 2011. “I. The Complexity of Intention” Critical Inquiry 37 (4):791–798.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coplan, Amy and Goldie, Peter, eds. 2011. Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curtis, Robin and Koch, Gertrud, eds. 2009. Einfühlung: Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart eines ästhetischen Konzepts. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curtis, Scott. 2009. “Einfühlung und die frühe deutsche Filmtheorie.” Translated by Kast, Franziska and Imorde, Joseph. In Einfühlung. Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart eines ästhetischen Konzepts, edited by Curtis, Robin and Koch, Gertrud, 79–104. Munich: Wilhelm Fink.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daston, Lorraine. 1995. “Curiosity in Early Modern Science.” Word & Image 11 (4):391–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daston, Lorraine and Galison., Peter 2010. Objectivity. Zone Press.Google Scholar
Decety, Jean and Lamm., Claus 2006. “Human Empathy through the Lens of Social Neuroscience.” Scientific World Journal (6):1146–1163.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Decety, Jean, ed. 2011. Empathy: From Bench to Bedside. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Decety, Jean and Ickes, William, eds. 2009. The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Quervain, Dominique J-F, Fischbacher, Urs, Treyer, Valerie, Schellhammer, Melanie, Schnyder, Ulrich, Buck, Alfred, and Fehr, Ernst. 2004. “The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment.” Science 305 (5688):1254–1258.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dilthey, Wilhelm. [1894] 1977. “Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology.” In Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding, translated by Zaner and Heiges, 41–81. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.Google Scholar
Dilthey, Wilhelm. [1910] 1977. “The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Expressions of Life.” In Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding, translated by Zaner and Heiges, 123–39. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.Google Scholar
Di Pellegrino, Giuseppe, Fadiga, Luciano, Fogassi, Leonardo, Gallese, Vittorio, and Rizzolatti, Giacomo. 1992. “Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study.” Experimental Brain Research 91:176–180.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dror, Otniel. 1998. “Creating the Emotional Body: Confusion, Possibilities, Knowledge.” In Emotional History of the United States, edited by Stearns, Peter N. and Lewis, Jan, 173–194. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Dror, Otniel. 2001. “Techniques of the Brain and the Paradox of Emotions, 1880–1930” Science in Context 14 (4):643–660.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Endell, August. 1898. “Formenschönheit und Dekorative Kunst.” 1. Die Freude an die Form. Dekorative Kunst: Eine Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Angewandte Kunst München. Verlagsanstalt F. Bruckmann A.-G. Band 1.Google Scholar
Ewald, Oscar. 1908. “German Philosophy in 1907.” Philosophical Review 17 (4):400–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fadiga, Luciano, Pavesi, L. G., and Rizzolatti, Giacomo. 1996. “Motor Facilitation during Observation: A Magnetic Simulation Study.” Journal of Neurophysiology 73:2608–2611.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Focus section on “The Emotional Economy of Science” 2009. Isis 100:4.Google Scholar
Gallese, Vittorio and Goldman, Alvin. 1998. “Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind reading.” Trends in Cognitive Science 2:493–501.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gallese, Vittorio. 2001. “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8:33–50.Google Scholar
Groos, Karl. 1902. Der aesthetische Genuss. Giessen: J. Ricker.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Groos, Karl. 1909. “Das ästhetische Miterleben und die Empfindungen aus dem Körperinnern.” Zeitschrift für Äsethik u. allgem. Kunstwissenschaft IV 9 (2):161–82.Google Scholar
Harrington, Anne. 1996. Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirzig, Rebecca. 2006. Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America. Rutgers NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Iacoboni, Marco, Molnar-Szakacs, I., Gallese, Vittorio, Buccino, G., Mazziotta, J. C., and Rizzolatti, Giacomo. 2005. “Grasping the Intentions of Others with One's Own Mirror Neuron System.” PLoS Biology 3 (3):529–535.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Iacoboni, Marco. 2008. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.Google Scholar
Iacoboni, Marco. 2009. “Imitation, Empathy, and Mirror Neurons.” Annual Review of Psychology 60:653–670.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jarzombek, Mark. 2000. The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Keysers, Christian, Wicker, Bruno, Gazzola, Valeria, Anton, Jean-Luc, Fogassi, Leonardo, & Gallese, Vittorio. 2004. “A Touching Sight SII/PV Activation during the Observation and Experience of Touch.” Neuron 42:335–346.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keysers, Christian and Gazzola, Valeria. 2010. “Mirror Neurons Reported in Humans.” Current Biology 20:R353–R354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koss, Juliet. 2010. Modernism after Wagner. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.Google Scholar
Lanzoni, Susan. 2006. “Diagnosing with Feeling: The Clinical Assessment of Schizophrenia in early Twentieth Century European Psychiatry.” In Emotions, Medicine and Disease, 1750–1950, edited by Alberti, Fay Bound, 169–190. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Lanzoni, Susan. 2009. “Practicing Psychology in the Art Gallery: Vernon Lee's Aesthetics of Empathy.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 45 (4):330–354.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lee, Vernon and Anstruther-Thomson, Clementina. 1897. “Beauty and Ugliness.” Contemporary Review 72 (Oct./Nov.):544–569; 669–688.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon and Anstruther-Thomson, Clementina. 1912. Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. London: John Lane, Bodley Head.Google Scholar
Leys, Ruth. 2011a. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37 (3):434–472.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leys, Ruth. 2011b. “II Affect and Intention: A Reply to William E. Connolly.” Critical Inquiry 37 (4):799–805.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipps, Theodor. 1900. “Dritter äesthetischer Litteraturbericht” III, Archiv für Systematische Philosophie 6 (3):377–409.Google Scholar
Lipps, Theodor. [1903a] 1923. Grundlegung der Ästhetik Vol. 1. Leipzig: Verlag Leopold Voss.Google Scholar
Lipps, Theodor. 1903b. Leitfaden der Psychologie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann.Google Scholar
Lipps, Theodor. [1906a] 1920. Aesthetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst. Die ästhetische Betrachtung und die bildende Kunst. Vol. 2. Leipzig: Leopold Voss.Google Scholar
Lipps, Theodor. 1906b. “Die Wege de Psychologie.” Atti del V. Congresso Internazionale di Psicologia tenuto in Roma dal 26 al 30 Aprile 1905, edited by Sante de Sanctis. Roma: Forzani.Google Scholar
Makkreel, Rudolf. 2000. “From Simulation to Structural Transposition: A Diltheyean Critique of Empathy and Defense of Verstehen.” In Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences, edited by Kögler, Hans Herbert and Steuber, Karsten, 181–193. Boulder: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Mallgrave, Harry and Ikonomou, Eleftherios, eds. 1994. Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893. Santa Monica CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities.Google Scholar
Massumi, Brian, 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affection, Sensation. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Morawski, Jill. 1997. “Educating the Emotions: Academic Psychology, Textbooks, and the Psychology Industry, 1890–1940.” In Inventing the Psychological: Towards a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, edited by Pfister, Joel and Schnog, Nancy, 217–244. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Müller-Tamm, Jutta. 2005. Abstraktion als Einfühlung. Zur Denkfigur der Projektion in Psychophysiologie, Kulturtheorie, Ästhetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach Verlag.Google Scholar
Myers, Charles S. 1909. Text-Book of Experimental Psychology. London: Edward Arnold.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plamper, Jan. 2010. “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein and Peter Stearns.” History and Theory 49:237–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Reddy, William M. 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riskin, Jessica. 2002. Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rizzolatti, Giacomo, Fadiga, Luciano, Gallese, Vittorio, and Fogassi, Leonardo. 1996. “Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions.” Cognitive Brain Research 3 (2):131–141.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosenwein, Barbara H. 2002. “Worrying About Emotions in History.” American Historical Review 107 (3):821–845.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Scheler, Max. 1923. Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. Bonn: F. Cohen.Google Scholar
Scheler, Max. 1970. The Nature of Sympathy, translated by Heath, Peter. Hamden CT: Archon Books.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky and Frank, Adam, eds. 1995. A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Singer, Tania, Seymour, Ben, O'Dougherty, John P., Stephan, Klaas E., Dolan, Raymond J., and Frith, Chris D.. 2006. “Empathic Neural Responses Are Modulated by the Perceived Fairness of Others.” Nature 439:466–469.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, Roger. 1992. Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stearns, Peter N. and Lewis, Jan. 1998. An Emotional History of the United States. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Takahashi, Hidehiko, Kato, Motichiro, Matsuura, Masato, Mobbs, Dean, Suhara, Tetsuya, and Okubo, Yoshiro. 2009. “When your Gain is my Pain and your Pain is my Gain: Neural Correlates of Envy and Schadenfreude.” Science 323 (5916):937–939.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Theunissen, Michael. 1986. The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Buber. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Titchener, Edward B. 1909. The Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes. New York: MacMillan.Google Scholar
Vaage, Margrethe Bruun. 2007. “Empathie. Zur episodischen Struktur der Teilhabe am Spielfilm.” montage/AV 16:1.Google Scholar
Vicedo, Marga. 2009. “The Father of Ethology and the Foster Mother of Ducks: Konrad Lorenz as an Expert on Motherhood.” Isis 100:263–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weidman, Nadine. 2011. “Popularizing the Ancestry of Man: Robert Ardrey and the Killer Instinct.” Isis 102:269–299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wicker, Bruno, Keysers, Christian, Plailly, Jane, Royet, Jean-Pierre, Gallese, Vittorio, and Rizzolatti, Giacomo. 2003. “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling Disgust.” Neuron 40:655–664.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Worringer, Wilhelm. 1908. Abstraktion and Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie. München: R. Piper. Translated in 1967 as Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. New York: International Universities Press.Google Scholar
Wulff, Hans J. 2003. “Empathie als Dimension des Filmverstehens: Ein Thesenpapier.” Montage/AV 12 (1):136–161.Google Scholar