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NAM YUN KIM

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Why do not we establish Empathics, study of Emapthy, as a separate and independent field of study?

Recently, people's attention is concentrated on community, connection, communication and emotional interaction. That is why Technology, Entertainment, and Design is becoming more and more important. Indeed, those issues are all about sharing how we 'feel', or empathizing.
We feel respected when someone listens to and empathizes with our own stories. We feel alive when we can understand how someone would have felt in a certain situation and help the person out based on the empathy.
This much, empathy has been and gradually becoming more and more powerful.
Despite such importance, there has been no official field of study about Empathy. Although many great scholars came up with great accomplishments in research on empathy, either biologically or scientifically, those studies are yet integrated as one study.
Now, I am suggesting all of you to start study of empathy, Empathics, discussing about importance, impact and essence of empathy and ways to promote it via on/offline interaction with other people!

Related Talks:
Topics: educaiton emotion empathic civilization empathy love philosophy psychology social interaction sociology
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    Varlan Allan 10+

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    Dec 6 2011: Is being able to display Empathy enough? It may be enough to satisfy some, but I feel terrible when I can't empathize with someone.

    After rereading the post I sadly did not address the question and now feel like an arse. I believe the answer to your question is probably found in many textbooks related to psychology. I do not believe empathy itself is a large enough field to be given an entire course to. You could create a course around it, but I think that it would be a pretty shallow well.
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    Varlan Allan 10+

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    Dec 6 2011: Maybe there could be a list made on levels of empathy to gauge what people are most and least empathetic toward. Sadly, empathy comes from experience, which means you have to go through a lot of b.s. to have it for others. I think that when one "displays" empathy it is not really the same thing as "having" empathy. Someone please correct me or give me your opinion because I feel that others may not see it the same way as I do.
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    Nicholas Lukowiak 50+

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    Dec 5 2011: Praising compassion is nothing new.

    It just appears to be more work than being self righteous.

  • NAM YUN KIM 500+

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    Dec 5 2011: Indeed, so many philosophers explored about empathy in their philosophy. For example, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche made Zarathustra murder God to restore human beings their ability to understand and respect their and other's emotion. MingZu in ancient China also described Empathy as human dignity and specified the quality into four categories.
    Likewise, numerous philosophers discussed about empathy in their works. If we can collect those ideas of empathy in philosophy, we will be able to approach to philosophy from different perspective to which can people make easier access to philosophy. I would like to label the study as Empathic Philosophy.
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