Our modern-day word for sympathy is derived from the classical
Greek word for fellow-feeling. Both in the vernacular as well as in
the various specialist literatures within philosophy, psychology,
neuroscience, economics, and history, "sympathy" and "empathy" are
routinely conflated. In practice, they are also used to refer to a
large variety of complex, all-too-familiar social phenomena: for
example, simultaneous yawning or the giggles. Moreover, sympathy is
invoked to address problems associated with social dislocation and
political conflict. It is, then, turned into a vehicle toward
generating harmony among otherwise isolated individuals and a way
for them to fit into a larger whole, be it society and the
universe. This volume offers a historical overview of some of the
most significant attempts to come to grips with sympathy in Western
thought from Plato to experimental economics. The contributors are
leading scholars in philosophy, classics, history, economics,
comparative literature, and political science. Sympathy is
originally developed in Stoic thought. It was also taken up by
Plotinus and Galen. There are original contributed chapters on each
of these historical moments. Use for the concept was re-discovered
in the Renaissance. And the volume has original chapters not just
on medical and philosophical Renaissance interest in sympathy, but
also on the role of antipathy in Shakespeare and the significance
of sympathy in music theory. Inspired by the influence of Spinoza,
sympathy plays a central role in the great moral psychologies of,
say, Anne Conway, Leibniz, Hume, Adam Smith, and Sophie De Grouchy
during the eighteenth century. The volume should offers an
introduction to key background concept that is often overlooked in
many of the most important philosophies of the early modern period.
About a century ago the idea of Einfuhlung (or empathy) was
developed in theoretical philosophy, then applied in practical
philosophy and the newly emerging scientific disciplines of
psychology. Moreover, recent economists have rediscovered sympathy
in part experimentally and, in part by careful re-reading of the
classics of the field.
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