PROGRAMME >> EVENT #19  

saturday aug. 30.time 18.30.Chiostro San Francesco - 3,00
Laura  Boella - The discovery of the other: empathy and imagination

listen to the audio file

Empathy is the faculty of understanding what another person feels, thinks and wants. In our conflict-torn societies where individuals seem more and more isolated, there is a true revival of empathy on a scientific and philosophical level. The discovery of the other happens when we recognize, in another person, a feeling or a worry that resembles ours. The processing of getting closer to this “other”, without hurting or projecting our experience onto him or her, involves many faculties of ours: brain processes we ignore, emotions, and our most mysterious mental activity, imagination.

Laura  Boella
is a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Università Statale of Milan. She has studied the major 20th-century female thinkers and is an expert on Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Maria Zambrano and Edith Stein. She has focussed on interpersonal relationships and on the feelings of sympathy, empathy, compassion. Among her most recent books are: Sentire l’altro. Conoscere e praticare l’empatia (2006); the Italian edition of H. Arendt, L’umanità in tempi bui (2006); Neuroetica. La morale prima della morale (2008), all published by Raffaello Cortina. This latter essay tackles an innovative field of research, namely neuroscience’s recent discoveries and their threat to moral thought. She is doing a new translation of Max Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy, for Guerini.