The idea is to take a position from the perspective of empathy on current trends. What would the empathic response be to the trend in question, especially crises and breakdowns.  

1. The world is filled with survivors who are perpetrators (and vice versa). Radical empathy is needed to relate to survivors who are also perpetrators. Radical empathy is the number one trend. What does that mean? The world is a more dangerous, broken place than it was a year ago. The challenge to empathy is that the dangers and breakdowns in the world have expanded dramatically over the long past year such. Standard empathy is no longer sufficient. Radical empathy is required. 

Image credit: Jan Steen, 1665, As the old sing, so pipe the young

The short definition of radical empathy: the events that occur are so difficult, complex, and traumatic that standard empathy breaks down into empathic distress and fails. In contrast, with radical empathy, empathic distress occurs, but one’s commitment to the other person is such that one empathizes in the face of empathic distress. One’s empathic commitment to the survivor enables the survivor to recover her/his humanness, integrity, and relatedness. The work of radical empathy engages how the impact and cost of empathic distress affect the different aspects of empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic responsiveness, delivering a breakthrough and transformation in relating to the Other. 

An example will be useful. A US soldier gets up in the morning. He is an ordinary GI Joe. He is manning a checkpoint. The sergeant, thinking the approaching car is a car bomb, gives what he believes is a valid military order to shoot at the car. The solider shoots. The car stops. But it was not a car bomb; it was a family rushing to the hospital because the would-be mother (now deceased) was in labor. The military debriefing of the events is perfunctory. Burdened by guilt, the soldier shuts down emotionally, and he stares vacantly ahead into space. Emotionally gutted, he does not respond to orders. He is shipped back to the States and dishonorably discharged. His marriage fails. He becomes homeless. The point? This person is now both a perpetrator and a survivor. The people who were shot experienced trauma by penetrating wounds. The soldier has moral trauma. Key term: moral trauma. He was put in an impossible situation; damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Let his team be blown up? Disobey what seems to be a valid military order? Hurt people who did not need or deserve to get hurt? His ability to act, his agency, was compromised by being put in an impossible situation. That is why the ancient Greeks invented tragic theatre – except that the double binds happen every day. Radical empathy specializes in empathizing with those who are both survivors and perpetrators. And this is much more common than is generally realized. 

Many examples of radical empathy can be found in literature (or in the New York Times), in which the hero or anti-hero of the story is caught in a double bind, damned if one does and damned if one doesn’t. Radical empathy and the literary artwork transfigure the face of trauma, overcoming empathic distress, and allowing radical empathy to enable the fragmented Other to recover her/his integrity. Persons require radical empathy to relate to, process, and overcome bad things happening to good people (for example: moral and physical trauma, double binds, soul murder, and behavior in extreme situations. For further reding on radical empathy, see the book of the same title in the References below. 

2. No human being is illegal. Mass deportations pending. Empathy, whether standard or radical, is clear on this trend: no human being is illegal. At the same time, the empathy lesson is acknowledged that empathy is all about firm boundaries and limits between the self and other, while allowing for communications between the two. It is the breakdown of empathy at the US national border – which does not mean wide open borders – is one reason among several for the result of the 2024 election. What if ICE agents (the immigration authorities) show up? Empathy is all about setting boundaries: The empathic response: Let’s see your judicial warrant, officer, please? (See The New York Times, Dana Goldstein, Jan 7, 2025: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/us/immigration-deportations-ice-schools.html.)

An empathic response would look like a workable Guest Worker Program (such as exist in the European union) that allows essential agricultural and food services workers to earn and send money back home. Yet the proverbial devil is in the detail, and being accused of the crime of shop lifting a sandwich or tube of toothpaste is different than actually committing one. Thus, empathy also looks like Due Process, and an opportunity to face one’s accuser. If one is standing outside a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s begging for food, it is not because one’s life is going so well. The gesture that any decent customer would make is to buy the person a sandwich. Of course, that is not going to scale up to address the estimated 37 million Americans (the majority not recent immigrants) living in poverty. Continued below under “5. The unworthy poor.” 

3. Psychiatry gets empathy (ongoing). Relate to the human being in front of you, not the diagnosis. Empathy teaches de-escalation. Empathy’s coaching to psychiatry as a profession is to do precisely that which psychiatry is least inclined to do, namely, relate to the human being in front of you, not to a diagnosis. 

Granted, the human being is a biological system. We are neurons all the way down. Yet emergent properties of our humanity (including empathy) come forth from the proper functioning of the neurons. The neurons generate consciousness, that subtle awareness of our environment that we humans share with other mammals. Consciousness generates relatedness to the environment and one another. Relatedness generates meaning. Meaning generates language. Language generates community, society, and culture. As Dorothy is reported to have said to Toto, “We are no longer in Kansas” – or psychiatry. 

So what’s the recommendation from the point of view of empathy? Relate to the human being sitting in front of you not to a diagnosis. That is the empathic moment. To be sure, a diagnosis has its uses in technical communications with colleagues or payers, but as a standalone label, diagnoses are overrated. 

Taking a step back, people get into psychiatry (and medicine in general) because they want to relieve pain and suffering, because they want to make a difference. Yet this aspiration is in stark contrast with the report at the American Psychiatric Association meeting that physical restraints were used some 44,000 times last year to constrain patients. (See Ellen Barry, May 21, 2024 In the house of psychiatry, a jarring tale of violence. Thus, The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/health/psychiatric-restraint-forced-medication.html)

 “Don’t hurt yourself (or anyone else!)!” is solid guidance; yet the particulars of the situation are challenging. The distance between fight and flight (fear) is narrow. Someone in the throes of an “amygdala hijack” is in an altered state of consciousness. This person literally cannot hear what is being said to him or her. This person is at risk of precipitating a bad outcome, especially if the psychiatrist or staff is also hijacked by an emotional reaction and emotional contagion. If as much effort were devoted to training staff in verbal escalation – talking someone back “off the ledge” – as in training them synch up straps, the outcomes would be less traumatic for all involved. Empathy in all its forms is a basic de-escalation skill that needs to receive expanded training and development.

It would not be fair to confront a psychiatrist with an either/or: “Are you relating to a biological system or to a human being?” because she (or he) is relating to both. Yet the pendulum does seem to have swung too far in the direction of biochemical mechanisms rather than interpersonal meaning, relations, and fulfilment. It is a fact that some 80% of people visit the medical doctor because they are in pain and hope to get medicine to cause them to feel better (and the other 20% have scheduled an annual checkup). That is well and good; and it is true that these psychopharm medicines change the neurons in your brain, but so does studying French and so do new and engaging life experiences; and, here’s the point, so does the committed application of empathy.

3. Violence against women continues to be a plague upon the land and a challenge to empathy.Standard empathy is not enough. This requires a level of radical empathy that has not been much appreciated. This is because many perpetrators are also survivors. (See the above example of the ordinary soldier who becomes both.) 

I hasten to add that two wrongs do not make a right. Two wrongs make twice the wrong. Intervention is required to get the woman safe, and recovery from domestic violence begins once the person is secure in their safety. That is not a trivial matter, and Safety Plans and Hot Lines continue to be important resources. One can incarcerate a perpetrator to protect the community (and the women in it), but that does not make him better. He still needs treatment. What are the chances he is going to get it? To cut to the chase: many perpetrators and survivors do not know what a satisfying, healthy relationship looks like. Survivors and perpetrators alike have come up in environments where physical violence is common. Once again, this is not an excuse, and two wrongs do not make a right. 

Regarding Peter Hegserth (Cabinet nominee for Defense Secretary): NBC News has reported that Mr. Hegseth’s heavy drinking concerned co-workers at Fox News and that two of them said they smelled alcohol on him more than a dozen times before he went on the air. The New Yorker reported: “A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran — Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America — in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.” His managerial skills are nowhere near the challenge of running the Pentagon. Meanwhile, according to a 2018 email obtained by the New York Times, Mr. Hegseth’s own mother called him “an abuser of women” as he went through his second divorce. It is particularly concerning to see Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) who had a check box on Domestic violence on her official site accept/excuse/embrace such behavior. Among the many women serving in the US Armed Forces, who can imagine that this candidate has their back? The esteemed Senator Ernst may usefully her from the concerned citizens.

The number one empathy lesson: a grownup man having temper tantrums (and worse) is not what a healthy relationship looks like! In a healthy relationship partners cooperate, help one another, respect boundaries, and if they disagree, they argue and “fight” fairly. Skills training belongs here. A major skill: setting boundaries, limits – pushing back on bullying in all its forms. (In addition, parents of diverse backgrounds and cultures have got to find better ways to set limits to and for their children than “whupping ‘em.”)

Woman have provided the leadership in this struggle for domestic tranquility and will continue to do so. From men’s perspective, this is a failure not only of standard empathy, but a failure of leadership. It calls for radical empathy to include survivors and perpetrates (once again, without making excuses for bad behavior). When powerful men – President Biden (now retiring), Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Senators and captains of industry – step up and say “Enough! What are you thinkin’, man?” then the issue will get transformed. These are conversations that are best had by men with men. Even if that sounds sexist, it makes a difference when a man tells another man that his behavior towards women or a woman is out of line and requires correction rather than when a woman says it (though it is equally true in both cases). Even though Jackson Katz’s video has been around for several years, it has never been better expressed:  “Violence against women: It’s a men’s problem”: https://youtu.be/ElJxUVJ8blw?si=k8LG0ewnL6ZKlgt9. Please circulate widely.

4. “Abandon reality all ye who enter here!” is inscribed over the sign-in to Facebook. “Facts are overrated.” Yet a rigorous and critical empathy knows that it can be wrong so it is committed to distinguishing facts from fictions. Empathy was never particularly concerned with the reasons why you are in pain, but how to relieve that pain. The corporation Meta (owner of Facebook (FB)) decides to end fact checking regarding posts on its social networking site (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/07/business/meta-fact-checking). It is hard not to be cynical at this moment. 

Many people know “empathy for everyone” is a pipe dream; yet there is no other way to bring it into the world than to work to make it real. The human imagination is a possibility engine, and it is the source of what is possible in the human relations defined by empathy. If the “crazy ideas” on Facebook (and elsewhere) were just that, crazy idea, they might actually be useful in terms of “brain storming.”. However, when non facts such as immigrants are stealing and eating your pets are represented as occurring events in the world, the damage to the community is significant. 

This is when radical empathy as “Red Team! Red Team!” comes in (see the references Zenko 2015). Think like the opponent. Take the opponent’s point of view, not to agree or disagree with him; but to get one’s power back over delusional thinking. Prejudice against individuals and groups has many sources – largely projection of one’s own fears and blind spots onto the devalued Other. However, ultimately prejudice is a form of mental illness – delusional thinking – at the community level. From an empathic perspective, FB becomes a site of delusional thinking, noting that even a broken clock gives the correct time twice a day.  By the way, the original Pizza-Gate conspirator, who, living in a persistent altered state of consciousness, claimed a popular local pizza parlor was really a nest of satanic pedophilia, was shot and killed by police on January 4, 2025 when he raised a gun during a police traffic stop. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/01/09/edgar-maddison-welch-pizzagate-killed/ Case closed. He was the father of two daughters. Tragically misinformed. Unnecessary. Fact checking saves lives!

5. Help for the unworthy poor. Empathy says the worthy poor need help; but radical empathy asserts that the unworthy poor need even more help(and who is deciding who is “worthy” anyway? See above under “no human being is illegal”). 

In a highly entertaining, albeit sexist retelling of the myth of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady – the alcoholic, unemployed father (Alfred) of Liza Doolittle confronts Professor Higgins with a request for money for his permission to subject his daughter to the enculturing “make over” of improving her language that is the main project of the plot. In a comic yet thought-provoking scene, the father notes that many people of means are making financial contributions to help the struggling, worthy impoverished (“the poor”); but who is helping the unworthy poor?! “I don’t deserve the handout. I am lazy and a drunk (in so many words); but give me ten pounds sterling anyway.” An admirably direct argument and not without a certain integrity. Yet if one grew up in poverty and even if the parent was not “whuppin’” everyone in sight or engaging with substances of abuse and neglecting basic education, then high probability one will satisfy the definition of “unworthy poor” – no (limited) motivation to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps. Yes, by all means, government needs to expand its efficiency and effectiveness, but this might not be an efficient process. Line up and with help from a bureaucrat (which used to mean simply “helpful office holder,” not “unempathic jerk”) fill out the forms. However, one cannot give people money; or rather the risk of doing so is that it is not going to make a difference. Educational vouchers? Financial skills training? Parental training? Food vouchers? Rental vouchers? Food, rent, and education.

Guilt trip, anyone? The rich get richer; the poor get – older. The devil’s advocate says the poor should work harder to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Empathy says that the devil already has too many advocates. A tax on billionaires’ net worth would generate enough funds in five years to reduce the number of people living in poverty (estimated to be some 37 million as of 2023) by 80%. Radical empathy is required!

6. Empathy is part of the mission of health insurance, not more monopoly rents to insurance corporations. The economics of health insurance are compelling – get everyone into the insurance pool and spread the risk. Risk that is spread is risk contained, managed, and conquered. It is a pathology of capitalism that competition does not function as designed in the matter of such common goods as clean water, clean air, and conditions necessary to health and well-being such as access to medical treatments Healthcare corporations are incented by competition to get rid of sick people (do not do business with them) since sick people reduce profits, even though sickness is why the insurance came into existence. This is madness! And this is why intervention of the federal authorities (and legislation) was needed to prevent corporations from excluding the pre-existing conditions (illnesses). Therefore, the trend is to make empathy a part of the mission of insuring healthcare.  

For example, there is an innovative medicine to treat schizophrenia that does not have as many of the undesired, troubling, painful side effects such as tardive dyskinesis of current medicines. However, out of the gate, it costs $1800 a month, and for pharmaceutical companies properly to recoup the staggering costs of development – what are the chances that insurance companies will cover it? Don’t hold your breath. According to the FDA News release about 1% of Americans have this illness and it is responsible for some 20% of disability claims. Think of the benefits for suffering, struggling survivors of this disease. Think of the cost reducing impact of an effective treatment on the federal budget. (For further background see:

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-drug-new-mechanism-action-treatment-schizophrenia )

7. Radical empathy contradicts the delusional belief that people committed to a suicide mission are going to yield to threats of violence. This theme, which is ongoing from last year, is yet another case for “Red Team! Red Team!” Think like the opponent – which may include thinking like the enemy. This grim empathy lesson was expressed by Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin (Oct 13, 2023) during Q&A in her talk, “The Triumph of Counter-Terrorism and the Despair of Human Rights” at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Aoláin draws on the example of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, The Troubles, between 1960 and 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. On background, this had all the characteristics of intractable hatred, perpetrations and human rights violations, the British government making every imaginable mistake, the Jan 30, 1972 shooting of 26 unarmed civilians by elite British soldiers, internment without trail, members of the Royal Family (Louis Mountbatten, the Last Viceroy of India, and his teenage grandson (27 Aug 1979)) blown up by an IRA bomb, the IRA (Irish Republican Army) launching a mortar at 10 Downing Street (no politicians were hurt, only innocent by-standers), and many tit-for-tat acts of revenge killing of innocent civilians. It is hard, if not impossible, to generalize as every intractable conflict is its own version of hell—no one listens to the suffering humanity—but what was called The Peace Process got traction as all sides in the conflict became exhausted by the killing and committed to moving forward with negotiations in spite of interruptions of the pauses in fighting in order to attain a sustainable cease fire. 

The relevance to ongoing events in the Middle East will be obvious. An organization widely designated in the West as “terrorist” changes the course of history in the Middle East. Hearts are hardened by the boundary violations, atrocities, and killings. The perpetrators lead their people off a cliff into the abyss, and the survivors of the attack defend themselves vigorously and properly, and then, under one plausible redescription, themselves become perpetrators, launching themselves off the cliff, following the perpetrators into the abyss, the bottom of which is not yet in sight. Survivors and perpetrators one and all call for and call forth radical empathy. Negotiate with the people who have killed your family. Empathize with that. 

The response requires radical empathy: to empathize in the face of empathic distress, exhausted by all the killing. Though neither the didactic trial in Jerusalem (1961) of Holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann nor the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995) lived up to their full potentials, they formed parts of processes that presented alternatives to violence and extra judicial revenge killings. In this frame, the survivor is willing to judge if the perpetrator is speaking the truth and expressing what, if any, forgiveness is possible. The radical empathy that empathizes in the face of empathic distress acknowledges that moral trauma includes survivors who are also perpetrators (and vice versa). (See Tutu 1997 in the References for further details.) In a masterpiece of studied ambiguity, radical empathy teaches that two wrongs never make a right; they make at least twice the wrong; and one who sews the wind reaps the whirlwind.

8. Empathy and climate change: you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone. Scientists describe global warming as a “wicked problem,” in the sense that so many variables are changing across so many scenarios that it is wicked hard—if not impossible—to conduct a controlled experiment. The readers of this article “know” the planet is warming. This is not just information, but heatstroke, a hurricane blowing the roof off of one’s house, catastrophic fires encroaching on cities, and disastrous flooding. Parts of the planet are becoming uninhabitable by humans because of extreme heat, hurricanes, and rising seas, which are indeed data, but not merely data as these events are lethal to human life. If wetlands, reservoirs, agricultural lands, landfill, tundra, are releasing methane (one of the major “greenhouse gases” contributing to global warming) in rapidly accelerating volumes, faster than ever, one may argue, an even greater effort should be exerted to curb methane from the sources humans can control, like cows, agriculture and fossil fuels (Osaka 2024). Yet what seems obvious in New York City or Chicago does not even get a listening in the mountains of Idaho much less the overcrowded cities of China, India, or Russia. The probable almost certain future comes into view, and there is about as much chance of this trend spontaneously reversing itself as that the San-Ti are going to arrive at light speed from Alpha Centauri and tell earth people how to fix it. What is amazing is that Bob Dylan’s example of rhetorical empathy has been available in his poetry and song since 1965 when, coincidently and on background, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, into law, and “surged” half a million US soldiers into DaNang, Vietnam. Transformation is at hand, though it requires further parsing. Thus, Dylan’s proposed rhetorical empathy (1965: 81):

Come gather ‘round people / Wherever you roam / And admit that the waters / Around you have grown / And accept it that soon / You’ll be drenched to the bone / If your time to you is worth savin’ / Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone / For the times they are a-changin’

The relevance of empathy should never be underestimated, and empathy as such is not going to staunch this flood. Nor is empathy going to solve “highly polarized social and political world,” unless citizens of plural persuasions, parties, and global geographies, who have stopped listening to opposing points of view, are willing to start listening to one another again. Key term: willingness. Everyone can think of a person (in-person or on TV) whose opinions—whether cultural, political, or cinematic—really drives one to distraction? That’s the person one should be asking out for a cup of coffee—not to try to persuade her or him, but to listen. The situation is so bad, that most people no longer associate with people with whom they disagree, so they can’t follow this simple recommendation. How then, in the face of such, obstacles is one going to use empathic practices to move the dial (so to speak) in the direction of such reduced polarization and expanded community? This leads to the next trend.

9. Rhetorical empathy is trending: the relationship between empathy and rhetoric has not been much appreciated or discussed – until now! Empathy and rhetoric seem to be at cross purposes. With empathy one’s commitment is to listen to the other individual in a space of acceptance and tolerance to create a clearing for possibilities of overcoming and flourishing. With rhetoric, the approach is to bring forth a persuasive discourse in the interest of enabling the Other to see a possibility for the individual or the community. At the risk of over- simplification, empathy is supposed to be about listening, receiving the inbound message; whereas rhetoric is usually regarded as being about speaking, bringing forth, expressing, and communicating the outbound message. Once again, in the case of empathy, the initial direction of the communication is inbound, in the case of rhetoric, outbound. Yet the practices of empathy and rhetoric are not as far apart as may at first seem to be the case, and it would not be surprising if the apparent contrary directionality turned out to be a loop, in which the arts of empathy and rhetoric reciprocally enabled different aspects of authentic relatedness, community building, and empowering communications. 

In rhetorical empathy, the speaker’s words address the listening of the audience in such a way as to leave the audience with the experience of having been heard. As noted, this must seem counter-intuitive since it is the audience that is doing the listening. The hidden variable is that the speaker knows the audience in the sense that she or he has walked a mile in their shoes (after having taken off her/his own), knows where the shoes pinch (so to speak), and can articulate the experience the audience is implicitly harboring in their hearts yet have been unable to express. The paradox is resolved as the distinction between the self and Other, the speaker and the listener, is bridged and a way of speaking that incorporates the Other’s listening into one’s speaking is brought forth and expressed. Rhetorical empathy is a way of speaking that incorporates the Other’s listening into one’s speaking in such a way that the Other is able to hear what is being said. (For further reading see Blankenship 2019; Agosta 2024b.)

10. Empathy becomes [already is] an essential aspect of critical thinking. Teach critical thinking. Critical thinking includes putting oneself in the place of one’s opponent—not necessarily to agree with the other individual—but to consider what advantages and disadvantages are included in the opponent’s position. Taking a walk in the Other’s shoes after having taken off one’s own (to avoid the risk of projection) shows one where the shoe pinches. This “pinching” —to stay with the metaphor—is not mere knowledge but a basic inquiry into what the other person considers possible based on how the other’s world is disclosed experientially. This points to critical thinking as an inquiry into possibility—possible for the individual, the Other, and the community. Critical thinking is a possibility pump designed to get people to start again listening to one another, allowing the empathic receptivity (listening) to come forth. 

In our day and age of fake news, deep fake identity theft, not to mention common political propaganda, one arguably needs a course in critical thinking (e.g., Mill 1859; Haber 2020) to distinguish fact and fiction. Nevertheless, I boldly assert that most people, who are not suffering from delusional disorder or political pathologies of being The True Believer (Hoffer 1953)), are generally able to make this distinction. A rigorous and critical empathy creates a safe zone of acceptance and tolerance within which people can inquire into what is possible—debate and listen to a wide spectrum of ideas, positions, feelings, and expressions out of which new possibilities can come forth. 

For example, empathy and critical thinking support maintaining firm boundaries and limits against actors who would misuse social media to amplify and distort communications. Much of what Jürgen Habermas (1984) says about the communicative distortions in mass media, television, and film applies with a multiplicative effect to the problematic, if not toxic, politics occurring on the Internet and social networking. The extension to issues of climate change follows immediately. Insofar as individuals skeptical of empathy are trying to force a decision between critical thinking and empathy, the choice must be declined. Both empathy and critical thinking are needed; hence, a rigorous and critical empathy is included in the definition of enlarged, critical thinking (and vice versa). (Note that “critical thinking” can mean a lot of things. Here key references include John Stuart Mill 1859; Haber 2020; “enlarged thinking” in Kant 1791/93 (AA 159); Arendt 1968: 9; Habermas 1984; Agosta 2024.)

In particular, critical thinking encompasses what the poet John Keats (1817) called “Negative Capability.” It enables one to dance in the chaos of the dynamic stresses, struggles, and successes one encounters: “I mean [. . .] when a man [person] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Such Negative Capability is a synonym of and a bridge to empathizing in the broad sense. Giving up certainty enables empathy and critical thinking to establish and maintain a safe zone of acceptance and tolerance for conversation, debate, self-expression. The sinking or swimming that the other poet, Dylan, proposes points to many things (including getting involved), yet it is most of all critical thinking. This is the space of inquiry—of asking what is possible—brainstorming—and calling forth projects and action. This results in a rigorous and critical empathy, nor going forward should any committed empathy advocate refer to empathy in any other way. (For further reading on Rhetorical Empathy see the article listed in the endnotes “Rhetorical empathy in the context of ontology.”)

The poet gets the last example of rhetorical empathy. One has to push off the shore of certainty and venture forth into the unknown possibilities of radical empathy. Bob Dylan (1965: 185) interrupted his climate change advocacy to become an empathy enthusiast. Dylan gets the last word: “I wish that for just one time / You could stand inside my shoes / And just for that one moment / I could be you” [.]

References

Agosta, Lou. (2024). Empathy Lessons. 2nd Edition. Chicago: Two Pears Press. 

Arendt, Hannah. (1952/1958). The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd Edition. Cleveland and New York: Meridian (World) Publishing, 1958.

__________. (2024b) “Rhetorical empathy in the context of ontology,” Turning Toward Being: The Journal of Ontological Inquiry in Education: Vol. 2: Issue 1, Article 5.
Available at: https://rdw.rowan.edu/joie/vol2/iss1/5

__________. (due out May 2025). Radical Empathy in the Context of Literature. New York: Palgrave Publishing. https://books.google.com/books/about/Radical_Empathy_in_the_Context_of_Litera.html?id=qdDk0AEACAAJ  The book does not merely tell the reader about radical empathy in the context of the literary art work; it delivers an experience of radical empathy in context in empathy’s receptivity, understanding, interpretation and responsiveness.

Arendt, Hannah. (1952/1958). The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd Edition. Cleveland and New York: Meridian (World) Publishing, 1958. 

________________. (1968). Men in Dark Times. New York: Harvest Book (Harcourt Brace).

Blankenship, Lisa. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Logan UT: Utah State University Press.  

Dylan, Bob. (1965). Bob Dylan: The Lyrics: 1961–2012. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Haber, Jonathan. (2020). Critical Thinking. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 

Habermas, Jürgen. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, Thomas McCarthy (tr.). Boston: Beacon Press. 

Kant, Immanuel. (1791/93). Critique of the Power of Judgment, Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (trs.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.

Keats, John. (1817). Letter to brothers of December 21, 1817: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rnanian/Keats-NegativeCapability.html [checked on 10/15/2024].

Mill, John Stuart. (1978: 1859). On Liberty, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

Desmond, Tutu. (1997). No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Random House.

Zenko, Micah. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.

© Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project