Susan Lanzoni. Empathy: A History; New Haven and London: Yale University Press; 408 pages; hardback $30.00; ISBN: 9780300222685 by Sarah Chaney A couple of years ago, I attended a colloquium on empathy at the University of Oxford. The organisers of this event were rightly concerned by the vague and varied definitions of empathy in medical research and practice and sought to remedy this. While they had found a number of clinical trials that purported to measure empathy, the introductory lecture noted, every single one of these gave a slightly different definition of what it was they were actually measuring! As Susan Lanzoni’s comprehensive history of empathy shows, this conceptual confusion around empathy is not new. Even after an explosion of interest in the term through the 1950s and 1960s, in 1979 the American social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark declared himself dismayed by the lack of “clear definition and a comprehensive theoretical approach” to the subject (p. 248). As

Lanzoni shows in this genealogy, the confusion lies to some extent in the fact that the meaning of the term has “shifted so radically that its original meaning transformed into its opposite” (p. 8). Lanzoni makes this shift clear by outlining a huge range of examples of studies in which empathy does not mean what the modern reader might expect. To take just one example of many, when the psychologist Edward Bullough found in 1908 that his subjects described coloured lights as having a particular temperament or character he called this “empathy” (p. 52). Even in the twenty-first century, many forms of empathy exist: “from emotional resonance and contagion, to cognitive appraisal and perspective taking, and to an empathic concern with another that prompts helpful intervention” (p. 252). While the book takes a chronological approach to the subject, the diversity of different meanings at play in any one period are thus made clear throughout. Lanzoni records the first use of the term “empathy”…

Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens (Eds) Why we disagree about human nature. Oxford University Press, 2018. 206 pp. £30 hbk. By Simon Jarrett If one day a disturbingly precocious child were to ask what part you had played in the nature/ nurture war, what would you reply? Were you with the massed intellectual ranks who, since the philosopher David Hull’s ground-breaking 1986 classic 'On Human Nature,' have denied that there is any such thing as a common nature for all humans? Or did you join Stephen Pinker’s 2003 counter-revolution, when The Blank Slate sought to reclaim the ground for the Enlightenment, and the idea that there is something essentially the same about all humans across time, space and culture? If you are not quite sure where you stand, or perhaps too sure where you stand, then this pleasingly eclectic collection of ten essays on human nature, and whether we can meaningfully talk about such a thing, will be of

great help. Its contributors, who come from psychology, philosophy of science, social and biological anthropology, evolutionary theory, and the study of animal cognition, include human nature advocates, deniers, and sceptics. We could perhaps call the sceptics ‘so-whaters’ – they agree there may be something we can attach the label 'human nature' to, but query whether it really matters, or carries any explanatory weight. These people would take our (hopefully apocryphal) infant prodigy aside and say, ‘well there are some conceptual complexities here that make it quite difficult to give you a straightforward answer.’ Human nature remains, alongside consciousness, one of the great explanatory gaps, a question that permeated philosophical enquiry in antiquity, lay at the heart of Enlightenment ‘science of Man’, and now forms a central anxiety of modernity.  The over-arching problem is, in essence, this: are there traits and characteristics that are biological, and not learned or culturally acquired, which we can say form something called the nature of the…

Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017; xiv + 411 pp. $96.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-40322-9; $32.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6. by Andreas Sommer If recent surveys of belief in magic are accurate, there is a good chance that you either hold some variant of these beliefs yourself, or that you may be puzzled by some otherwise secular-minded colleague, friend, or family member who does. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm might not be a believer in spirits himself, but reveals toward the end of this remarkable book a significant factor in his choice of becoming a religious scholar: his grandmother Felicitas Goodman, the noted anthropologist who caused quite a stir when she openly confessed her commitments to shamanism. An expert of East Asian religions, Josephson-Storm’s previous cross-cultural studies have certainly prepared him well to tackle vexing questions regarding the Western occult. But it is perhaps especially owing to a

deep respect for his heretical ancestor that The Myth of Disenchantment is marked by a refreshingly even-handed approach which neither mocks nor advocates unorthodox beliefs. Instead, Josephson-Storm makes a bold and sincere effort to come to grips with hidden continuities of magic in often surprising places, and the persistence of Western normative assertions of the disenchantment of the world as the flip-side of that puzzle. Regarding the latter issue, the book can be considered a historical test of the actual adherence to basic naturalistic proscriptions in the humanities and human sciences. After all, as Josephson-Storm reminds us, Max Weber’s famous verdict of disenchantment is often misunderstood as motivated by a normative agenda itself. The introduction to the book formulates a fruitful principal method and rationale: to “investigate the least likely people – the very theorists of modernity as disenchantment – and show how they worked out various insights inside an occult context, in a social world overflowing with spirits and…

Steve Fuller. Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game; New York: Anthem Press; 218 pages; paperback $39.95; ISBN: 978-1-78308-694-8 by Steve Baxi A consistent problem in the journalistic discourse on post-truth is the confusion between the recent phenomenon of post-truth and some historically justifiable, apolitical, entirely objective Truth - the latter having been, on some level, eclipsed by the former. Indeed, this is precisely how the Oxford English Dictionary understands post-truth, and thus the focus in mainstream media outlets and contemporary studies of truth have focused on the contentions between Truth and post-truth. However, this understanding misses the relationships of power and conditions of possibility for knowledge with respect to truth - power relations and conditions we can claim to value in research fields that place the pursuit of truth over the recent, overblown idea of Truth. In the face of academic experts, Brexit, and social media, Steve Fuller argues that post-truth is “a deep feature of at least Western intellectual life, bringing

together issues of politics, science and judgement in ways which established authorities have traditionally wished to be separate” (2018, 6). Fuller’s Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game attempts to provide a set of case studies of post-truth in academia, as well as in contemporary political movements, to establish the historical character of post-truth, or what he calls a post-truth history of post-truth. The book is divided into seven chapters, each examining Fuller’s own previously developed concepts and social epistemological stances on expertise, philosophy, sociology, and science and technology studies. Fuller especially draws on Vilfredo Pareto’s distinction between "lions" and "foxes" to help set up the tensions in his case studies. Where the lions play by the rules of the game, the foxes attempt to change the rules, but do so such that the lions believe themselves to be following the very same rules they have always followed. Fuller’s approach here is loosely genealogical, perhaps even Foucauldian, as he…

by Hannah Proctor Oisín Wall, The British Anti-psychiatrists: From Institutional Psychotherapy to the Counter-Culture, 1960-1971 (London: Routledge, 2018) The Spring 1972 issue of the short-lived self-published journal Red Rat: The Journal of Abnormal Psychologists includes a review by Ruth Davies of Ken Loach’s film Family Life alongside the Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev’s W.R., Mysteries of the Organism.[ref]Ruth Davies, ‘Film Review: W.R. + Family Life’, Red Rat: The Journal of Abnormal Psychologists, 4, Spring 1972, pp. 28-29, p. 28. Issues of Red Rat are held in the archives at MayDay Rooms, London.[/ref] According to the reviewer both films were then showing simultaneously at the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street in London and in ‘both cases, the theme of the film is the work of a radical psychologist whose ideas have helped lay the foundations of alternative psychology; in the case of Family Life, the work of RD Laing, and in Mysteries of the Organism, Wilhelm Reich.' Davies outlines the different approaches to psychology presented in the films: ‘Family

Life is an account of the genesis of schizophrenia firmly in the Laing tradition,' following a young woman whose diagnosis with schizophrenia is presented as deriving from her family situation, while W.R., Mysteries of the Organism combines documentary footage shot in America (interviewing people at Wilhelm Reich’s infamous Organon laboratory and following various artists around New York) with a heavily stylised narrative about sexual revolutionaries in Belgrade encountering a dashing Soviet figure skater who embodies Communism in its repressive and sexually repressed form. Though Davies is primarily concerned with the content of these two films, I was struck by how their wildly contrasting formal qualities–Loach’s drab naturalism (people wearing beige clothes drinking beige cups of tea in beige institutional rooms) versus Makavejev’s audacious experimentalism (people tearing off lurid clothes knocking down the walls of their bohemian rooms)–resembles a contrast at the heart of Oisín Wall’s new book, The British Anti-psychiatrists: From Institutional Psychotherapy…