Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past

Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past is a comprehensive consideration of the role of empathy in historical knowledge, informed by the literature on empathy in fields including history, psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, and sociology.

Thomas A. Kohut is the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Professor of History at Williams College, USA. A historian with psychoanalytic training, Kohut has published on topics in German history and on the relationship between history and psychoanalysis.

Introduction;  Chapter 1:  Historical Excursus: Empathy in the Debates over Knowing in the Natural and in the Human Sciences; Chapter 2: The Principal Contemporary Definitions of Empathy;  Chapter 3: Narrower Definitions of Empathy and their Relation to Historical Inquiry;  Chapter 4: Three Examples of Empathy in Historical Understanding;  Chapter 5: How We Know in Empathy;  Chapter 6: Is Historical Empathy Unique?;  Chapter 7: The Authority of the Empathizing Historian;  Chapter 8: Concluding Remarks;  References;  Index