Journal ArticleDOI
The Role of Empathy in Literary Reading: From Einfühlung to the Neuroscience of Embodied Cognition, with the Example of Kafka's The Metamorphosis
TLDR
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Hermann Lotze, Robert Vischer, and Theodor Lipps pioneered the notion of Einfühlung, a term translated into English empathy by Edward Titchener in 1911 as discussed by the authors .Abstract:
Abstract:In the second half of the nineteenth century, Hermann Lotze, Robert Vischer, and Theodor Lipps pioneered the notion of Einfühlung, a term translated into the English empathy by Edward Titchener in 1911. This article investigates the role of empathy in literary reading by reconnecting it to its origins in the theories of Einfühlung and by revisiting these theories in the light of neuropsychological studies of embodied cognition carried out since the nineties. Contemporary to the coinage of the term empathy and to the broader dissemination of the notion of Einfühlung, Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915) is here used as a test terrain for the hypotheses generated by this investigation. Kafka's novella shows us how literature can use "fantastic cognition" (Kukkonen) to open a space of empathic indetermination in which the reader can resonate with structures of feeling extended beyond "normal" human sensorimotor forms.read more
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but not Sensory Components of Pain
TL;DR: Only that part of the pain network associated with its affective qualities, but not its sensory qualities, mediates empathy, suggesting that the neural substrate for empathic experience does not involve the entire "pain matrix".
Journal ArticleDOI
Motor facilitation during action observation: a magnetic stimulation study
TL;DR: It is concluded that in humans there is a system matching action observation and execution that resembles the one recently described in the monkey.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Brain's concepts: the role of the Sensory-motor system in conceptual knowledge
Vittorio Gallese,George Lakoff +1 more
TL;DR: It is proposed that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of structure to characterise both sensory- motor and more abstract concepts, and it is argued against this position using neuroscientific evidence, results from neural computation, and results about the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics.
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