Annotation
The goal of this course is a phenomenological interpretation of the function of empathy (sympathy) and of our access to passions of other people in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. We will point out that Hume's understanding of empathy is surprisingly rich and interprets our experience with other people in various circumstances of our human life. Moreover, the access to the mind of another person is for Hume a condition of possibility of bearable operations of our own mind without which the mind succumbs to indefference. As we will see, there are three moments of the theory of empathy, the moment of conception, the moment of belief and the moment of affective vivacity. We will see how Hume works with variations of these moments of empathy to explain phenomenological givenness of another person in the context ot the shared world.
In the end of the course, we will attempt to present Thomas Reid's critique of Hume's theory of empathy and its creative development in Adam Smith's work.