The central questions that Lanzoni seeks to answer are: “How did we get here? And can history shed light on what empathy means today?” (p. Lanzoni identifies her approach as akin to David Armitage’s method of serial contextualism, which provides “a way of delving into significant historical moments with detail yet still holding to an expansive view” (p.

For each of these vignettes, one gets the impression that there is enough material to fill a whole book. Lanzoni uses thematic vignettes to elaborate on how the empathy concept was deployed for specific concerns at specific times. The story unfolds in roughly chronological order, showing how empathy developed from aesthetic roots, was taken up as a technical scientific term in clinical and social psychology, and then stood at the centre of political debate in the wake of World War II and during the Civil Rights Era. This expansive new account of the history of empathy demonstrates the ways in which the concept has been imagined and reimagined across multiple discourses over the course of about a century. Susan Lanzoni, Empathy: A History (Yale University Press, 2018) She completed her PhD in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. Prior to returning to Cambridge as a Teaching Associate, she spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) in Klosterneuburg, Austria (near Vienna). Her research is informed by her background in cognitive science and time spent working in labs, conversing with practising scientists.

Riana’s current research focuses on social cognition and, in particular, empathy. In this review for the History of Emotions Blog, she discusses Susan Lanzoni’s new history of empathy. Dr Riana Betzler is a philosopher of cognitive science, medicine, and biology.

Against empathy review