Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-Enactment, Hermeneutics and Education - Paperback

by Tyson Retz (Author)

Empathy and History offers a comprehensive and dual account of empathy's intellectual and educational history. Beginning in an influential educational movement that implanted the concept in R.G. Collingwood's re-enactment doctrine, the book goes back to reveal the fundamental role that empathy played in the foundation of the history discipline before tracing its reception and development in twentieth-century hermeneutics and philosophy of history. Attentive to matters of practice, it illuminates the distinct character of the historical context that empathetic understanding seeks to capture and sets out a new approach to empathy as a special variety of historical questioning.

Author Biography

Tyson Retz is Associate Professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway. He holds a doctorate in history from the University of Melbourne.