ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the important question of how we know in empathy. Specifically, it considers three factors that are frequently seen as making empathic knowledge and understanding possible: knowledge of the historical subject’s context; the existence of specific experiences shared by historian and historical subject; and, closely related to the last, the existence of universal experiences or of a universal human nature. Although acknowledging that knowledge of context and shared experiences or a common humanity facilitate empathy, the chapter argues that the assumption that we can only know others by analogy with ourselves overlooks the fact that, as a result of the intersubjective nature of knowledge and the power of the human imagination, we can know people who are different from us and experiences of others that we have never had ourselves.
