Empathy and History

<p> <em>Empathy and History</em> 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.</p>