In the past few years, there has been a lively debate on whether and how phenomenology can

contribute to social cognition research. Notably, some have doubted whether first-personal,

phenomenological descriptions of intersubjective experience and interaction can support or

disconfirm certain theories about social cognition (e.g., Spaulding 2015). In contrast to such an

assessment, the aim of the present contribution will be to present an overview of the rich and

detailed discussion of empathy found in the phenomenological tradition, focussing particularly

on those aspects of this discussion that we believe to contain important and subtle insights of

contemporary relevance.

Our approach in the following will be as follows. First, we will examine the account of

empathy offered by the two phenomenologists whose writings on the topic we take to be

the richest and clearest, Husserl and Stein, explicating their arguments for the claims that

(i) empathy is a sui generis mode of intentional experience, (ii) the basic form of empathy

can nevertheless be characterised as perception-like, and (iii) that a higher-order form of

empathy is a more imagination-like way of understanding other persons from their own

personal perspective.