ABSTRACT
In everyday language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “people often confuse the words empathy and sympathy.” As is clarified promptly, “empathy means ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’, whereas sympathy means ‘feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune’.” In contemporary phenomenology, the concept of empathy is also widely discussed and used in the context of embodied and social cognition research, psychopathology, social ontology and collective intentionality, virtuality, and aesthetics, as well as in interdisciplinary cooperation with psychology and anthropology. To conclude, one should note that in phenomenology, but also in philosophy in general, in psychology, anthropology, and neighbouring disciplines, empathy has become the most widely used term. It has become an umbrella term for phenomena that have traditionally been designated with “sympathy” or “compassion.”
