ABSTRACT
Part of the huge literature on Hume and Smith dealt with two related pairs of concepts: sympathy/empathy and contagion/projection. For the first pair, the question is whether Humean and Smithian sympathy can be interpreted in terms of empathy. Regarding the second pair, many scholars maintain that in Hume, sympathy develops as emotional contagion, while in Smith, sympathy is a faculty by means of which an individual projects herself toward another person whose passions she reconstructs. The thesis put forward in this chapter is that Hume – probably more influenced than Smith by the traditional notions of sympathy and “animal spirits” – was of the opinion that under certain conditions, emotions, and moral passions can be transmitted from one person to another as a consequence of the uniformity of their physical nature. This implies that an empathic relationship between agent and spectator can take shape by means of a metaphorical contagion. Like Hume, Smith thinks that physical states are easily communicated because bodies are naturally receptive. Agent and spectator experience a sort of bodily empathy, enabling them to identify with each other. Unlike Hume, for Smith, the problem is more complex as regards moral sentiments because he clarified that when the spectator places herself in moral and emotional situations experienced by another person, she does not assume the latter’s identity, but maintains her own. The more she has knowledge of the other person’s situation, the more she “feels with another,” but she does not identify with the observed person.
