ABSTRACT
Ethical dilemmas in health care therefore need to be analysed from the point of view of the encounter with the suffering person. However, it is far from clear how empathy fits into the standard picture of biomedical ethics and the framework of moral principles that are most often stressed there, such as respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. Martha Nussbaum has shown how the Aristotelian notion of practical wisdom rests on an understanding of emotions as containing knowledge about the world shared with other human beings. In Edith Stein's seminal study The Problem of Empathy, published in 1917, a phenomenological theory of empathy is found, which that manages to combine different aspects of the phenomenon in a rich and coherent way. The idea of hermeneutics as a method peculiar to the humanities has been used as a theoretical basis to develop interpretive manuals for uncovering the meanings of texts and other kinds of artefacts for a long time.
