Eugenia Stefanello

Empathizing with others is thought to be a useful, if not necessary, skill for a wise person to possess. Beyond this general conceptual assonance, however, there have been few systematic attempts to conceptualize this relationship. This paper aims to address this issue by investigating what role empathy is said to play inphronesisand whether there is a legitimate place for it in Aristotelian (or neo-Aristotelian) accounts of practical wisdom. First, after a brief overview of Aristotle’s account ofphronesis, I will try to define three different ways in which empathy is thought to contribute to it according to the existing literature, based on a conceptual distinction between affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and sympathy. Second, I will ask whether empathy is the best conceptual candidate for Aristotle’s account ofphronesisand, more generally, whether the wise person should always rely on empathy in order to deliberate and act well. My tentative answer will be that empathy does not seem to be perfectly compatible with the concept ofphronesis, nor is it its best ally.

In Rita Charon's account of narrative medicine, empathy seems to be an essential element of the clinical relationship. However, empathy has not received much attention, which I believe is problematic. First, I show that not only is there no clear definition of what empathy is, but that this conceptual gap creates ambiguity about its role in the practice of narrative medicine. Second, I argue that certain passages in Charon's work seem to implicitly characterize empathy as a combination of cognitive empathy, affective empathy, and sympathy, and that its inclusion in the practice of narrative medicine can be problematic. Third, following Dan Zahavi, I argue that a phenomenological account of empathy not only seems most compatible with the practices, values, and theoretical framework of narrative medicine, but is also capable of resolving the problems posed by alternative definitions of empathy and the ambiguity about the role of empathy in narrative medicine.