How Does It Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy

The three-year DFG/AHRC-funded project ‘How Does It Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy’ is excited to announce its final event, with a conference of the same title.

What does it mean to understand another person? Does it involve not just understanding what moves them, but also grasping how they actually feel? How does this relate to empathy, and our capacity to take on the feelings of others?

We have been exploring a number of related topics, including:

- The epistemic significance of interpersonal phenomenal understanding

- Whether phenomenal understanding requires specific abilities

- Whether phenomenal understanding is factive

- Whether phenomenal understanding is a unique type of understanding

- Non-epistemic dimensions of interpersonal understanding

- Interpersonal understanding and evaluation

- Interpersonal understanding and attitudinal accord

- The virtue of being an understanding person

- How affective empathy contributes to interpersonal understanding

- Failures of affective empathy

- Affective empathy, norms and justification

Now our final event will take place at The University of Liverpool on June 26th-28th.

The provisional schedule is as follows:

Monday 26th June

2:00pm - 3:30pm Lizzy Ventham – “Empathy and Reasoning”

3:45pm - 5:15pm Antti Kauppinen – “Empathy, Bias and Reason”

Evening Lecture (open to the public)

6:00pm - 7:30pm Monika Betzler – “Empathy as a Normative Power”

Tuesday 27th June

 9:00am - 10:30am Neil Roughley – “3 Ways of Going Along”

 10:45am - 12:15pm Thomas Schramme – “Empathy and the Other Minds Problem”

 Lunch

  1:30pm - 3:00pm Amy Kind – “Imagination, Society, and the Self”

 3:15pm - 4:45pm Christiana Werner – “Imagining Experiences and Testimonial Injustice”

Wednesday 28th June

 9:30am - 11:00am Yujia Song – “Empathic Understanding: Missing the Target”

 11:15am - 12:45pm Katharina Sodoma – "On Being an Understanding Person"

Registration is not required, but if you would like to attend then consider dropping an email to [email protected] to help give us a rough idea of numbers.