Beyond Mirroring
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition October 9, 2018 Dan Zahavi, John Michael 12 citations
The current debate on empathy suffers from a diversity of definitions and no consensus. This paper does not aim to resolve these disputes but instead explores the potential of applying embodied, extended, enactive, and embedded (4E) approaches to empathy research. These approaches integrate insights from phenomenology and cognitive sciences, highlighting the role of reciprocity, intentional alignment, embodied simulation, and the second-person perspective. They also challenge the widespread assumption that empathy amounts to affective matching or mirroring.