Are you feeling like a natural empath who can’t seem to get any empathy? Get some empathy here. Empathy Lessons, the book, is for a general audience – a readable approach to expanding empathy in your life and the community:

01. Click here to order: Empathy Lessons  

The following professional publications are included for those visitors to this site who have an academic, scholarly interest. Okay, I acknowledge there are actually more than ten. These are peer-reviewed publications and tend to be scholarly. No apologies for that – just noting that if you as a reader want specific personal guidance on expanding your empathy or other specific personal issues, then the recommendation is to give me a call for an initial complimentary consultation. Finally, for videos of presentations and interviews, you may go to the Media page on this site or my Youtube.com channel named “Lou Agosta”.

02. A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative, and Recovery: Available in June 2015: Click here to order: A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative, Recovery .

03. A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. This work provides a short history of the distinction “empathy” in the ideas of Hume, Kant, Lipps, Freud, Scheler, Stein (Edith), and Husserl.  “Okay, I’ve read enough – I want to order to book.” Click here to order from Amazon  – A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy.

04. Empathy in the Context of Philosophy is the title of a web site and the title of a book:

To order the book, Empathy in the Context of Philosophy click: here

Another possibility to order – a discount code is available if you order directly from Palgrave, the publisher as indicated. This price is available to individuals only. This offer is not available to our trade and library customers. Offer only valid outside Australasia & Canada. Orders must be placed direct with Palgrave Macmillan. To order your copy at this special price, quote discount code PM15THIRTY. Click to order from Palgrave direct here.  [Palgrave offers expires May 31, 2015.]

05. A Rumor of Empathy in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. click here: HeideggerRumorOfEmpathy [Note: May also be purchased at Springer.com if you do not want a pre-publication page layout version.] Heidegger was one of the inventors of existentialism, though he rejected that label. This essay develops a four part definition of empathy out of the Dasein-analysis of Martin Heidegger – empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic responsiveness (in language) are developed out of Heidegger’s design distinctions for human beings (affectivity (Befindlichkeit), understanding, interpretation as a derivative form of understanding, and speech):

06. Chapter Six of my empathy book is where Heinz Kohut’s notion of empathy as vicarious introspection is engaged from the perspective of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic discipline: click here:  ChapterSixEmpathy

07. Chapter Three of my empathy book on “Empathy Between Death and the Other”: click here:   HeideggerChapterThreeEmpathy

08. This essay is a chapter in the two volumes Empathy I and II edited by Joe Lichtenberg and others. It looks at how empathy is the foundation of human intersubjectivity, where “intersubjectivity” is used in the sense of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. A kind of Kantian transcendental argument is developed out of a single paragraph in Heinz Kohut’s Self Psychology: click here:  EmpathyIntersubjectivitybyAgosta

09. Before there was “empathy” there was “sympathy.” This essay engages four different definitions of “sympathy” in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739), and, yes, the overlap and differences with “empathy” are significant. Click here: HumeOnSympathyEmpathy

10. A book review by yours truly of Arnold Goldberg’s book, The Analysis of Failure on what can be learned from failed psychoanalytic cases (which is much). Click here: GoldbergAnalyticFailureReview2014

11. This is one of my favorite legacy publications, which looks at images of fragmentation and integration of the self in one of the classic folktales edited by the Brothers Grimm. It makes the point that without empathy a significancy aspect of our humanity is missing. The hero of the story does not know who to experience shuddering (visceral fear, goose flesh). That experience is a “proxy” or substitute for his entire capacity to experience emotions. Without that capacity, he lacks humanity. The hero’s fairy tale journey and adventure in the world allows him to recover his empathy and become a whole and complete human being. The Recovery of Feelings in the Folktale. Click here:  JRHRecoveryFeelingFolktaleAgosta

12. Heidegger on Aristotle’s Account of the Emotions. This essay engages the account of the emotions provided by Aristotle. Amazingly enough, the most complete account of the emotions provided by Aristotle is not in his psychology but in his Rhetoric. The speaker has to understand the emotions in order to arouse and de-arouse (quiet) them. Heidegger points this out in Being and Time (1927) where Heidegger says (in so many words) that this is the “best ever” account of the emotions. However, Heidegger is doing fundamental ontology and leaves this aspect of the emotions undeveloped. This essay develops it further. This Hot Link is an essay on this subject published in Philosophy Today (Dec 2010) – click here – AgostaHeideggerIssue4 2010-Agosta

13. An early version of the above-cited multidimensional definition of empathy: Click here: Vol.6-2AgostaHeideggerianApproachtoEmpathy

14. This legacy essay explains why Kant scholars should be interested in fairy tales. Click here:  KantStudienKantsTreasureHardToAttainAgosta

15. An essay that looks at archeological metaphors in Freud and philosophy, inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s book on Freud and its use of the archeological metaphor. Caution – the attached file is large (21MB)  – so if it does not load for you, please leave me a comment and i will break it up into parts, okay? For further details, click here:  – IJPPPsychoanalysisandPhilosophyAgosta and part two – IJPPPsychoanalysisandPhilosophyAgostaPart2

In conclusion, my commitment is to a gracious and generous listening – empathy. I have performed significant academic, scholarly work on empathy in order to make my commitment to a gracious and generous listening (empathy) a professional as well as a personal reality. My intention is that empathy be less of a rumor and an expanding reality in the life of the community.

(c) Lou Agosta, Ph.D. and the Chicago Empathy Project