Suchergebnisse

Abstract
When we see a child crying, the urge to help him and to comfort him comes to us spontaneously. We understand what he is experiencing, and feel in us something of his sadness, his distress: this is what we call empathy. This sense of the other is the fruit of our evolutionary history and is hardwired in our biology. Empathy has interested a lot of thinkers and in particular the Scottish philosophers of the Age of the Enlightenment such as Adam Smith or Hume. More recently, the philosophers Robert Gordon (St Louis, Missouri) and Alvin Goldman (Tuscon, Arizona) proposed the theory of simulation according to which when we understand the other, we simulate the other's point of view and we use this prospective to understand the other and predict his behavior. The French neuropscyhologist Jean Decety adopted this point of view. He specifies that the empathy is the capacity to mentally simulate the subjectivity of the other, to put ourselves in the shoes of another: it lies on biological systems.

THERE'S A SPECTRUM OF INTENSITY OF EMPATHY RANGING FROM EXCESSIVE EMPATHY TO EXTREMELY NEGATIVE OR DIS-EMPATHY. EMPATHY FROM THE EXTREME POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE MAY SERVE VARIOUS FUNCTIONS IN DAILY LIVING AND PARTICULARLY IN POLITICS. VARIATIONS IN EMPATHY IN POLITICAL CONFLICT ARE DISCUSSED IN RELATION TO THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS OF ISRAELIS. THERE ARE ADVANTAGES AS WELL AS DISADVANTAGES IN ALLOWING ONESELF TO EMPATHIZE, AS WELL AS TO WITHHOLD EMPATHY. IT'S CONCLUDED THAT IT WOULD BE OF VALUE FOR THE ISRAELIS, AS WELL AS NATIONS TO LOOK AT THEMSELVES IN REGARD TO SPECIAL REACTIONS TO EMPATHIZING WITH OTHERS.

The paper deals with the concept of empathy applied in the contemplative experiment to understand the suffering of the victims of the war in Ukraine. I discuss the concept of empathy in the phenomenological perspective and symbolic interactionists' view. I needed this discussion to frame the conclusions from the contemplative experiment I did with my students. I used the contemplative methods of research. The students did self-observations and self-reports on their lived experiences while observing photos of the victims and refugees from Ukraine. Breathing exercises (pranayama) were practiced between different self-observations to clean the minds and release tensions. At the end of the experiment, the students were also asked about the empathy deficit in contemporary society, and provided comments on it. Finally, I concluded how empathy is evoked and embodied, and I answered the question about whether it is possible to be empathetic toward people in a totally different and traumatic situation. I end with the statement that empathy is a direct reaction to the condition of the suffering of other people. However, it is also socially-framed. I conclude that it could be socially-developed to cope with an empathy deficit.

Gelare Khoshgozaran, a Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist, gave her initial performance of "UNdocumentary" as part of the welcome to what we took from is the state exhibition at Queens Museum in New York City. This performance entailed a reading, by the artist and audience members, of Khoshgozaran's original declaration of asylum to the US government. When this produced empathetic and, in Khoshgozaran's words, "depressed" reactions from the audience, Khoshgozaran altered the performance, rewriting the document to reflect how she understands her life trajectory, as opposed to what queer asylum seekers are expected to produce to become subjects of and legible to empire. The next iteration of the performance is a refusal of legibility and empathy for a life narrative she, in some ways, lived, but simultaneously did not identify with. This article argues that the revised performance of "UNdocumentary" interrupts heteronormative space and time, crafting a queer otherwise world where relationality is pushed out of the realm of identification, inviting a bond forged through opacity rather than the violence of transparency.

With its foundations of injury, harm, and pain, the sociology of punishment is poised to give attention to the role of empathy at precisely those instances of social experience where human connection, understanding, and social knowing are destroyed, avoided, prohibited, or simply impossible. I explore this predicament through a specific case drawn from fieldwork in a geriatric prison, where institutional and intersubjective relations established by prison workers challenge empathic connections. The 'graying' of the prison population, one of mass incarceration's unanticipated consequences, brings issues of pain, death, and dying to the fore. The majority of research to date on aging and dying in prison has had an important descriptive and policy orientation. There has been less of an emphasis upon the theoretical underpinnings of such a turn and the nature of intersubjective relations at the intersection of care and punishment. There have been no intensive ground-level analyses of aging in prison against the backdrop of mass incarceration in the contemporary era. This study seeks to fill that vacuum while offering a more complex understanding of the relevance and limits of empathy to the study of punishment.