Just posting my empathy reading annotations. Not really back. Matrevers writing on empathy is, as always, so clear.

Hashtag empathy isn’t real and too unstable in terms of meaning tbh. Article is only 7 pages. But a great little history + state of the field. pic.twitter.com/1iTJJ5lhxV

— Jade E. Davis (@jadedid) October 5, 2020

Lunch reading today was the following:

Matravers, Derek. “Empathy and The Danger of Inventing Words.” The Philosophers’ Magazine 85 (2019): 26-31.

It helped me sort through a thought that has been rolling around in my head enough to put it in to words that may or may not make sense. I am not sure yet. I guess I am still trying to figure out why people so desperately need empathy to be “real” and “measurable” even when it contains its own contradictions/impossibility (see annotated reading pages in the photos that were part in the tweet for a good explanation of the contradiction in the two primary ways empathy is used) :

Because society has not successfully secularized morality outside of moral philosophy, “empathy” has become the social arbiter of an idealistic moral code. The empathy code attempts to evacuate “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” from the pages of the bible into the collective consciousness of humankind.