Art and Experience, Utrecht, © 1996. All rights reserved
Empathy forms an integral part of embodied perception. It is understood most adequately as a re-enactment by the beholder of the first-person acquaintance of the beholded person's experience. Sympathy is distinguished from empathy in that it supplements the re-enactment with a positive evaluation. Empathy with represented persons or events by being disembodied presupposes pre-perceptual imagination and must be accounted for subjectivistically. (VIII:2 and 4)© Rob van Gerwen
Last update: 9 April 1996
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