Empathy and Ethics

Magnus Englander is associate professor at Malmö University and associate editor for the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology. His phenomenological research is situated within the interdisciplinary research context of Health and Society, with an interest in topics such as psychopathology, empathy, and qualitative research methodology. He is the author of multiple articles on phenomenological psychology and the editor of Phenomenology and the Social Context of Psychiatry (2018).Susi Ferrarello is assistant professor at California State University, East Bay. She is a philosophical counselor and writes for Psychology Today. She has published novels, poetry, and academic books on philosophy, including Bioethics and Emotions; The Phenomenology of Sex, Love, and Intimacy; Ethical Experience: A Phenomenology; and Husserl’s Ethics and Practical Intentionality.

Empathy and Ethics is an impressive, timely, and original contribution. The explication of the connection between empathy and ethics is almost absent in contemporary literature, making the volume a novel contribution that should be of interest for a wide range of disciplines. The contributor list is impressive, including some top researchers in their respective fields, and the abstracts jointly indicate a comprehensive and balanced set of contributions that are both well connected and cover a lot of different ground.

• Chapter 1: Why Empathy Means Nothing—and Everything—for Ethics, John J. DrummondChapter 2: Ethics, Empathy, and Vulnerability: Trust as a Way of Making Sense of Our Vulnerability and Dependability, Esteban Marín-ÁvilaChapter 3: Emotion, Reality, and Ownership, Craig DerksenChapter 4: Embracing Ambiguity: Simone de Beauvoir’s Responsive Ethics, Maren WehrleChapter 5: The Personalistic Attitude: Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein on Empathy as the Intuition of the Person as Value, Dermot MoranChapter 6: The Role of Empathy in the Affective Twist of Husserl’s Critique of an Axiological and Practical Reason, Carlos LoboChapter 7: Phenomenology as Reverence: The Role of Reverence in the Phenomenological Method of Dietrich von Hildebrand, Alexander MontesChapter 8, “Against” Empathy: From the Isolated Self to Intersubjectivity in Martin Heidegger’s Thinking and the Consequences for Health Care, Francesca BrencioChapter 9: Being (N)One of Us: The Ethical and the Body, Henning NörenbergChapter 10: Tomas