Basic Empathy And Reenactive Empathy

Empathy is always considered as a central clue in the research on understanding other people. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a possibility in which basic empathy and reenactive empathy can be combined in a certain perspective in the tradition of phenomenology. Then a special approach to other people will be investigated.The clue of this paper starts with tracing back to the theory of inference by analogy that is considered to be the forefather of the theory about the relationship between self and other in the first chapter. And then the topic of the empathy is introduced:firstly the source of the notion of empathy will be investigated; then it is important to know how the phenomenon of empathy becomes an epistemically central tool to understand other minds.In the second chapter the focus will be turned to the discussion about the main background of the tradition of phenomenology, in which there are two different views concerning the relationship between self and other. It is the second view that will be discussed in depth. The view presupposes a certain kind of community in order to account for the possibility of an encounter between self and other.In the third chapter a main finding is that the empathy that is discussed in the tradition of phenomenology is still a kind of basic empathy. Basic empathy is a perceptual ability that is not mediated by the theory or the inference, by which we can understand other people’s feelings directly according to their expression. However, a kind of true understanding includes the meaning and the motive of the feelings or the acts of other people as well as their feelings and acts. Therefore the mode of the reenactive empathy must be introduccd. The prime tasks in the fourth chapter are where reenactive empathy comes from and what it is. In conclusion, the basic empathy and the reenactive empathy constitute a new way to understand other minds.