Empathy and the Aesthetic Mind : Perspectives on Fiction and Beyond
Date Issued
June 1, 2025
DOI
10.5040/9781350409552.0007
Abstract
Few ideas have been so widely accepted as the idea that art transports us to other places
and times and offers new perspectives as we float between real and fictional worlds. In
reading Pride and Prejudice, we feel absorbed in life in nineteenth-century Regency
England; in seeing Gericault’s Raſt of the Medusa, we immerse ourselves in the horrors
of the shipwreck that shook France’s political and social life by 1816. Sometimes, this
deep and vivid immersion in an artwork affords, in the words of Rae Langton (2019:
78), a ‘shiſt in self-location’, a sense of first-personal presence in alien experiences: we
not only see the world through an other’s lenses, but we affectively and/or cognitively
relate to experiences that primarily belong to someone else. is remarkable
phenomenon is invariably called empathy, whether manifested in everyday experience
or the experience of art. e aim of this volume is to probe the character and role of
empathy in our engagement with different forms of art, but also its significance beyond
the artistic encounter: its value for cognition, our emotive life and our moral stance.
and times and offers new perspectives as we float between real and fictional worlds. In
reading Pride and Prejudice, we feel absorbed in life in nineteenth-century Regency
England; in seeing Gericault’s Raſt of the Medusa, we immerse ourselves in the horrors
of the shipwreck that shook France’s political and social life by 1816. Sometimes, this
deep and vivid immersion in an artwork affords, in the words of Rae Langton (2019:
78), a ‘shiſt in self-location’, a sense of first-personal presence in alien experiences: we
not only see the world through an other’s lenses, but we affectively and/or cognitively
relate to experiences that primarily belong to someone else. is remarkable
phenomenon is invariably called empathy, whether manifested in everyday experience
or the experience of art. e aim of this volume is to probe the character and role of
empathy in our engagement with different forms of art, but also its significance beyond
the artistic encounter: its value for cognition, our emotive life and our moral stance.
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