The Introduction of “Empathy” into English.

Rae Greiner has the kind of deep dive into word history that I love, in this case “1909: The Introduction of the Word ‘Empathy’ into English.” She begins thus: Empathy is a hot topic these days, on the lips of cognitive scientists, philosophers, literary critics, and U.S. Presidents alike. But what is it? Consider the opening paragraph of the opening essay of a 2011 collection entitled The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. In “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,” C. Daniel Batson writes: Students of empathy can seem a cantankerous lot. Although they typically agree that empathy is important, they often disagree about why it is important, about what effects it has, about where it comes from, and even about what it is. The term empathy is currently applied to more than a half-dozen phenomena. These phenomena are related to one another, but they are not elements, aspects, facets, or components of a single thing that is empathy, as one might say that an…