ABSTRACT
Empathy is often conceived of in terms of mental simulation: one understands someone else’s experience by generating a first-person experience much like it. This chapter offers a different account, by drawing on descriptions of empathy in clinical practice and generalizing from them. Empathy, it is proposed, involves a distinctive kind of interpersonal attitude, which is integrated into an exploratory process. It is more about appreciating interpersonal differences than generating similarities, and simulation is not required. Hence, the role of imagination in empathy is not restricted to that of recreating or re-enacting another person’s experiences, and empathy does not involve suspending one’s own perspective in order to adopt that of someone else. An empathic process encompasses a much wider range of imaginative achievements, and one’s own first-person perspective is retained throughout.
