Empathy and History

The History and Function of Empathy in Historical Studies is the first comprehensive account of empathy’s place in historical scholarship, history pedagogy, and the philosophy of history. It explains how empathy became central to teaching history in schools, and traces its roots in nineteenth-century German historicism.

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Empathy and History offers a comprehensive and dual account of empathy’s intellectual and educational history. Beginning in an influential educational movement that implanted the concept in R.G. Collingwood’s re-enactment doctrine, the book goes back to reveal the fundamental role that empathy played in the foundation of the history discipline before tracing its reception and development in twentieth-century hermeneutics and philosophy of history. Attentive to matters of practice, it illuminates the distinct character of the historical context that empathetic understanding seeks to capture and sets out a new approach to empathy as a special variety of historical questioning.