ABSTRACT
Empathy, once reviled as an intuitive mode of understanding, is now being hailed as an imaginative form of simulation. This chapter compares the theory of simulation with Dilthey's views on empathy, Verstehen, and the methodology of the human sciences and argues for some important divergences. If empathy involves a kind of projection through which the subject loses itself, then it is not conducive to understanding. It is not surprising then that Dilthey prefers the term Mitfuhlen. To feel with or sympathize with does not demand a loss of self and is therefore more compatible with understanding. Dilthey's theory of the human sciences works at the interface of the common or everyday, and the more traditional demand that science must provide a universally valid mode of explicating its subject matter. The chapter examines the latter option later, but when it comes to the possibility of transposing oneself into another self this must be understood on the basis of Dilthey's structural psychology.
