Sympathy: A History

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. Available in OSO: Contributors to this volume - Rene Brouwer is a lecturer at the University of Utrecht, where he teaches on law and philosophy in the Faculty of Law. He works on theory of law and topics in ancient philosophy, with a special focus on Stoicism, its origins and reception, and the tradition of natural law. He recently published The Stoic Sage. The Early Stoics on Wisdom, Sagehood and Socrates (Cambridge University Press). Remy Debes is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. His research is in the areas of Ethics and the History of Ethics, with an emphasis on Scottish Enlightenment, Human Dignity, and Moral Psychology. He is currently editing Dignity: History of a Concept (forthcoming in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series) and (with Karsten Stueber) Ethical Sentimentalism (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). Julie Candler Hayes is Professor of French and Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses primarily on literary and philosophical texts of the French Enlightenment; she has also written extensively on contemporary literary theory and the history and theory of translation. Her most recent book is Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600-1800 (2009). Her earlier books study French theatre and Enlightenment concepts of systematicity in literature, philosophy, and science. Her current scholarly work looks at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women moral philosophers. Ryan Patrick Hanley is Associate Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. He is the author of Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2009), editor of the Penguin Classics edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Penguin, 2010), and of Adam Smith: A Princeton Guide (forthcoming from Princeton University Press). His most recent book is Love's Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). Karolina Hubner is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. She is the author of a number of articles on Spinoza's metaphysics. David M. Levy is a professor of economics at George Mason University and a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society. His Ph.D. in economics is from the University of Chicago where he wrote his dissertation under George Stigler. Sandra Peart and he revived the doctrine of analytical egalitarianism from classical economics. They have co-directed the Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economics for fourteen years. Christia Mercer is Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She is the author of Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development and most recently of The Philosophy of Anne Conway: Radical Rationalism and the Feminization of Nature. She is the general editor of Oxford Philosophical Concepts. Elizabeth Millan is a Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. In 2004, she was awarded a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Her publications include a book on Schlegel, edited volumes on Romanticism and Goethe, and several articles on aspects of Alexander von Humboldt's work. Elizabeth is currently finishing a book, The Romantic Roots of Alexander von Humboldt's Presentation of Nature. Ann Moyer is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of Renaissance Europe, especially sixteenth-century Italy. Moyer is an Executive Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, and serves as Executive Director of the Renaissance Society of America Sandra J. Peart is dean of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. She obtained her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Toronto and is president of the International Adam Smith Society, co-director of the annual Summer Institute for the History of Economic Thought, and a former president of the History of Economics Society. She has written or edited eight books and more than 50 refereed articles, many with David M. Levy. Bernard Reginster is Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy at Brown University. He has published extensively on issues in 19th century ethics, particularly in German thought. His most recent book, The Affirmation of Life. Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, was published by Harvard University Press in 2006. He is currently working on another book on the genealogical critique of ethical outlooks, The Will to Nothingness, as well as on issues from psychoanalytic psychiatry. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord is the Morehead-Cain Alumni Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the Director of the University's Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program. Professor Sayre-McCord works primarily in metaethics, moral theory, and the history of moral philosophy. Eric Schliesser is BOF Research Professor in Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University. He has published widely in early modern philosophy and the sciences, philosophy of economics, and philosophical methodology. He has edited volumes on Adam Smith and Isaac Newton. Vernon L. Smith was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 for his groundbreaking work in experimental economics. He has joint appointments with the Argyros School of Business & Economics and the School of Law at Chapman University. Smith has authored or co-authored more than 250 articles and books on capital theory, finance, natural resource economics and experimental economics. In 1991, the Cambridge University Press published Papers in Experimental Economics, and in 2000, a second collection of more recent papers, Bargaining and Market Behavior. Cambridge published his Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms in January 2008. Smith has received an honorary Doctor of Management degree from Purdue University, and is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bart J. Wilson is the Donald P. Kennedy Endowed Chair in Economics and Law at Chapman University's Economic Science Institute. He has published papers in the American Economic Review, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. His research has been supported with grants from the National Science Foundation, the Federal Trade Commission and the Institute for Justice.