How Does it Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy
Professor Thomas Schramme has been awarded £350,000 for the project “How Does it Feel? - Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy”. The grant application was selected within the newly established UK and German research collaboration programme between UKRI’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - DFG). Thomas will pursue this project with his colleague Professor Neil Roughley (Essen University), who has been awarded €572.000.
The project aims to make a crucial contribution to a theory of interpersonal understanding by providing philosophical accounts of three dimensions of the phenomenon: (1) grasping what it is like or how it feels for another to be in some situation; (2) endorsing or accepting another’s feelings; and (3) achieving these as a result of emotionally or affectively empathising with the other.
Thomas and Neil’s research will develop a unique combination of insights from epistemology (on the nature of understanding and its relationship to knowledge), from philosophy of mind (on how people identify and grasp subjective experiences), from metaethics (on endorsement or appreciation of another’s psychological state) and from philosophical psychology (on the types and mechanisms of successful and failed empathy).