With Empathy in the Context of Philosophy, Lou Agosta seeks to make a philosophical contribution to the debate on what empathy is, a debate that has often taken place mainly in the psychological arena. While this topic enjoyed its academic hay-day nearly 100 years ago, he tells us discussions about the nature and experience of empathy are making a comeback.
Agosta sees humankind entering a new empathetic age, brought on by such things as discoveries in neurology and discussions in the media about the fitness about Supreme Court judges (the vetting process includes investigating if the individual has too little or too much empathy), however the core problem from a century ago remains: empathy was never definitively settled, and thus we still don’t know what it is.
