ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the two principal contemporary accounts of empathy: “simulation theory,” which is based in part on the discovery of mirror neurons; and the “phenomenological position,” which understands empathy not as mimicry but as part of an intersubjective relationship between the knower and the known. The chapter also presents “theory theory,” the third principal contemporary philosophical account of how we know the minds and mental states of others, in which empathy plays no role at all.
