Junguo Zhang

Shared Decision-Making (SDM) is widely regarded not merely as a cornerstone of contemporary medical ethics, but also as a central construct within modern clinical practice and healthcare governance. It aims to integrate medical expertise with patients’ values and lived experiences. Yet its implementation often encounters two persistent obstacles: power imbalances, in which physicians control the timing, rhythm, and content of communication, and epistemic asymmetries, in which professional medical knowledge is privileged over patients’ first-person experiences. These asymmetries not only restrict patients’ participation but also distort the reciprocity necessary for genuine collaboration. To examine these challenges, this paper draws on Husserl’s transcendental person theory and the dynamic reversibility between natural and transcendental attitudes to develop a phenomenological physician attitude-switching framework. Within this framework, physicians alternate between a natural attitude, in which diseases are understood within biomedical objectivity, and a transcendental attitude, in which illness is interpreted as an existential condition embedded in personal, cultural, and ethical contexts. Oscillation between these stances enables physicians to both preserve diagnostic rigor and remain responsive to patients’ vulnerability, subjectivity, and moral agency. The paper further develops the ethical implications of this framework, illustrating its practical utility through a representative case study in autism care, where the balance between medical authority and patient experience is particularly fragile.

C. Jason Throop and Dan Zahavi attempted to clarify the fundamental issues surrounding phenomenological empathy, including its meaning, boundaries, and characteristics. However, their work has been met with significant criticism from numerous scholars. These critiques primarily focus on three aspects: (1) the scope of phenomenological empathy is too narrow to explain the motivations and causes of others’ behavior; (2) empathy relies on reasoning and other cognitive tools, thus failing to guarantee its directness; (3) difficulties persist in maintaining the asymmetry of empathy. This paper engages with the ongoing debate on empathy, addressing Husserl’s phenomenology of empathy from three key points: the goal and boundaries of empathy, empathy as direct perception, and the asymmetry of empathy. In doing so, this paper responds to the critics’ objections and offers a clearer understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology of empathy. The paper demonstrates: (1) that Husserl’s phenomenology of empathy is, in its primary sense, a theory of the constitution of intersubjectivity and the objective world that transcends the individual subject; (2) that Husserl’s theories of embodied expression and horizon support the possibility of empathy as direct perception; (3) that empathy involves a mutual understanding while adhering to the irreducibility of the self and the other.