Discussing Empathy: What, precisely, is it?

With this episode, Choice is pleased to debut a semi-regular series of special interviews with OAT-winning authors. The Outstanding Academic Titles (OATs for short) are an annual list of the best academic titles reviewed by Choice. The 2018 list is just out and available in our January 2019 issue and online at ChoiceReviews.org. In this series, Dr. Randolph Cornelius, professor of psychological science at Vassar College and longtime Choice reviewer, interviews Dr. Heidi Maibom, professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, about empathy and her most recent edited work, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. Their discussion ranges widely over the volume’s chapters, and brings together Dr. Cornelius’ psychological work with Dr. Maibom’s philosophical insights. They begin their conversation with perhaps the most foundational question in the study of empathy: what, precisely, is it? And from that base, they build a nuanced and informative description of empathy that incorporates insights from science, philosophy, environmentalism, and spirituality. Dr. Cornelius gets Dr. Maibom to explain some of the thinking behind the structure of The Handbook in this episode, and in neat philosophical style, Dr. Maibom parses Dr. Cornelius’ probing about why empathy is an interesting phenomenon for a philosopher to study into its personal and disciplinary parts. Along the way, they begin to uncover some ideas about what differentiates “emotional contagion” from “empathy proper.”