ABSTRACT
This paper considers explores problems that arise from the claim that empathy involves imagination; in particular, imagining being in the circumstance of another (‘perspective taking’) It assumes that empathy involves (a) an actual felt emotion that (b) has an object. It argues that theorists of empathy face a dilemma. Either those who empathize feel an actual emotion or they do not. If they do, the phenomenology of the empathic emotion is explained, but not the emotion’s object. If they do not, there is some account of the emotion’s object, but not of the phenomenology. This conclusion is taken to support Kendall Walton’s view that empathy is best thought of as not involving simulating the mental states of another.
