Narratives of Empathy: Encounters between Animals and Humans in Philosophy, Science and Literature 1850-2010

与强调人与动物之间不可逾越的鸿沟的理性主义立场相反，最近关于动物与人类关系的研究强调了尽管物种差异，但理解他人的同理心的能力。从这一建议出发，本项目将从历时性和系统性的角度分析19世纪和20世纪的共情叙事。目前，移情的概念受到了很多关注，而这个词的历史可以追溯到18世纪初，在这一背景下几乎没有人注意到。设想研究的一个基本假设是，从19世纪中叶开始，针对非人类他人的移情方法在理论和实践中越来越多地发展起来，反对理性主义话语，这种话语主张动物和人类之间有明显的分界线。这个比较项目将追溯从19世纪中叶到现在的哲学、科学和文学文本中的同理心叙事，这些文本关注的是人与动物之间的相遇。该项目将首先询问移情叙事如何挑战认识论理论和人类与动物之间的人类学界限。在这里，问题将被提出，物种边界是否被移情人与动物关系的具体叙事阶段所转移；进而，与理性主义差异模式的断裂是否会揭示出另一种实践和思维的可能性。其次，将阶段共情情感知识与当代动物学知识联系起来，分别置于当时的动物仪器中。第三，最后的问题是，关于人与动物关系中的共情概念，哪些历时性变化可以被识别出来，以及它们以何种方式与所分析文本的特定叙事结构和诗歌形式相关联。

Contrary to rationalist positions which emphasize the unbridgeable hiatus between humans and animals, recent studies on animal-human-relationships accentuate the capacity of empathy for understanding the other in spite of species differences. Starting from this suggestion the project will analyze from a diachronic and systematic perspective narratives of empathy in the 19th and 20th century. Currently a lot of attention is paid to the concept of empathy, whereas the history of the term, which reaches back to the early 18th century, is hardly noticed in this context. One of the basic assumptions of the envisaged study is that from the middle of the 19th century empathic approaches toward the non-human other are increasingly developed in theory and praxis against a rationalist discourse, which asserts a distinct line of demarcation between animals and humans. The comparative project will trace narratives of empathy from the middle of the 19th century up to the present in philosophical, scientific, and literary texts which focus on the encounter between humans and animals. The project will first ask how narratives of empathy contest epistemological theories and anthropological demarcations between humanity and animality. Here the question will be posed whether the species boundaries are shifted by the specific narrative staging of empathic human-animal-relations; and further, whether the breakage with a rationalist model of difference will disclose alternative practices and possibilities of thinking. Secondly the staged empathic emotional knowledge shall be put in relation to the contemporary zoological knowledge, and be located in the animal apparatus of the period, respectively. Thirdly, the final questions will be which diachronic alterations can be discerned, regarding the concept of empathy in human-animal-relations, and in which way they relate to the specific narrative structure and poetic form of the analyzed texts.