ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. It proposes that shame, on a certain phenomenological understanding of it, can be just as relevant to the experience of distinct others as empathy is usually taken to be. The author's conception of shame stems from Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Psychological and anthropological accounts of shame focus on behavior and the motives behind it. Phenomenological accounts of shame, by contrast, treat shame as a paradigmatic intentional experience. Empathy is isomorphic with Sartre's shame, as reconstructed to make perspicuous why shame strikes it immediately, to account for the phenomenon that become the direct intentional object of intentional experience. The chapter presents reconstructions of the empathy in Edith Stein and Husserl has yielded a structure of precertification that is similar to the structure of precertification yielded by my reconstruction of Sartre's shame.
