ABSTRACT
While the concept of empathy is relatively new to the philosophical scene, it is taken to identify a range of affective phenomena that have presumably been with people all along. Empathy is sometimes thought essential to morality, the hallmark of love, a key to understanding the mental life of others, people's natural safeguard against narcissism, even the emotional import of basic forms of mirror-neurological activity. To make a complex history very brief indeed, it can be said that empathy has its conceptual birth in the moral psychology of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy and its lexical birth in the aesthetic theory of nineteenth-century German philosophy. No one would claim that people empathically identify with all characters in a work, and few would claim that people's engagement with any one character is from cover to cover empathic. One should be to able guess at the nature of counterarguments against enlisting empathy to account for literature's presumed capacity to offer experiential knowledge.
