Common conceptualizations of empathy in mainstream psychology frame the phenomenon as the vicarious experiencing of another person's feelings, perceptions, and thoughts that results from imaging oneself in another's situation and replicating their mental state. Although commonly regarded as foundational for interpersonal relationships, as well as moral and altruistic action, contemporary neuroscientific and evolutionary accounts of empathy routinely employ reductive and mechanical explanatory strategies to account for the phenomenon. As many scholars have shown, however, such approaches ultimately rob human actions of their meaning and moral content because they deny human agency in favor of mechanism and efficient causality. By way of alternative, this article will explore the pioneering work of the German philosopher Edith Stein, whose phenomenological account of empathy, though often overlooked, offers a novel perspective in which empathy is a fundamentally relational and genuinely meaningful and moral event (Stein, 1989). Empathy, according to Stein, is a basic way of knowing in which other embodied, experiencing subjects are given to us. Stein's work, we will argue, offers a deeper understanding of human empathy.

Abstract Insufficient attention has been paid to the ways in which Newtonian conceptualizations of time encourage the view in contemporary psychology that only efficient causal explanations are viable, explanations that ultimately render meaningful, purposive, morally rich human actions and relationships illusory. In short, psychology’s pervasive adoption of Newtonian assumptions about time and causation renders the discipline incapable of understanding human behavior, its primary focus of study, in any but fundamentally inhuman ways. This paper aims (1) to provide a critique of the Newtonian conception of time and its commitment to efficient causality, particularly as commonly present in contemporary psychological theory and practice, and (2) to examine the phenomenological account of time provided in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Specifically, we will explore some of the ways in which Levinas’ account of time as fundamentally intersubjective provides an alternative conceptual grounding for understanding the therapeutic relationship as one of infinite ethical responsibility.

Contemporary psychology has typically endorsed two approaches to understanding expressed experience as narrative data: representation and presence. We argue that neither representation nor presence fully captures the nature of experience, especially insofar as distinctly ethical phenomena such as self-deception are part of our human behavioral repertoire. Developing more sensitive methodological approaches to the study of such experiences requires a fuller appreciation of the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical nature of human behavior which informs human action and our forms of inquiry about it. Effectively addressing this aspect of our humanity will require a rather dramatic shift in our methodology-based understanding in psychology. In short, investigating fundamentally morally significant phenomena must be carried out in a way that acknowledges how the moral aspect of any phenomena is accounted for, and that requires careful understanding of the moral character of the most primitive level of experience. It is at this level that the phenomenon of mispresence is encountered. Therefore, this article seeks to unfold that phenomenon and articulate its implications for psychological study of lived experience.

This article argues for an understanding of theory that has lost its once more prominent role in psychology. In recent decades, theory has been reduced to the formulation of models that are taken to be little more than specific explanations of particular experimental findings or patterns in quantitative data sets. We argue that for psychology to be taken seriously as a human science, theory must serve a more fundamental function in the discipline. Theory must offer an account of what really is "the case" (i.e., the truth) about our human being-in-the-world. Further, theory must serve another equally vital function in the discipline because truth-the aim of any theory-necessarily involves the articulation of meaningful implications and, thereby, captures the evaluative element at the heart of any truth claims. Thus, we argue psychological theory, qua theory, rather than as a mere model, has something to say about truth and about ethics.

This paper offers a theoretical analysis of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and its claims regarding human autonomy. Self-determination theorists have advanced a form of self-regulated, engaged behavior (i.e., autonomy), founded upon on a consilient account of human motivation that assumes multiple, hierarchical levels of organization and causation (e.g., biological, psychological, and social). Autonomy, from this perspective, is taken to emerge from underlying biological mechanisms, but also able to exert its own causal effects in the world as a unique psychological phenomenon. We contend that in theorizing this way, self-determination theorists have invoked a mixed discourse of mechanism and autonomy that leaves important questions unanswered, perhaps most importantly those concerning how autonomy as a kind of volition can fit coherently in the mechanistic account of world that they advocate. We then offer an alternative perspective based upon the work of various hermeneutic-phenomenological thinkers in philosophy and psychology. This alternative perspective conceptualizes human phenomena such as autonomy and motivation in agentic terms, emphasizing meaningful participation in possibility-laden contexts of everyday practices.

Recent decades have witnessed a profound increase in scholarly work and scientific research conducted under the banner of evolutionary psychology. Although evolutionary psychologists typically disavow any historical or conceptual link to the political or scientific project of eugenics, or at the very least downplay the current relevance of such linkages, a growing number of evolutionary thinkers have begun to embrace a biological science of cognitive and moral enhancement. This article examines some of the ways in which advocates of enhancement assume human agency as central to their project even as their naturalistic explanations of human behavior deny that agency. The article also argues that the utopian moral project that animates the evolutionary enhancement movement is undercut by the materialist metaphysics that undergirds the neo-Darwinian worldview employed to ground the project in the first place, a metaphysics that relativizes and ultimately rejects any meaningful morality or moral endeavor whatsoever.

This paper will look at the results of what has been termed “the crisis of modernism” and the related rise of postmodern perspectives in the 19th and 20th centuries. It concentrates on what is arguably the chief casualty of this crisis – human agency – and the social science that has developed out of the crisis. We argue that modern and postmodern social science ultimately obviate human agency in the understanding of what it means to be a human being. Attention is given to the contemporary intellectual world and the way in which it has been deeply informed by neo-Hegelian and other postmodern scholarly trends, particularly in accounting for how agency has come to play little role in social science understanding of human action. The paper also offers an alternative conception of human agency to the commonly endorsed libertarian model of free choice. Finally, the paper argues that this view of agency preserves meaning and purpose in human action and counters the pervasive social science worldview that sacrifices agency and meaning to powerful invisible abstractions.

There is a fairly common misunderstanding of science in our contemporary intellectual culture which, when employed in the study of human beings, obviates any form of genuine or meaningful human agency. The discussion of agency in this chapter goes to the heart of this issue. Popular conceptions of science, because they reflect the assumptions of scientism, often leave no room for agency, as both science and agency are commonly understood. This essay will examine the problematic understandings of science and agency that have produced the confusion that is commonly experienced as agency is discussed—or sidestepped—within the mainstream literature of psychology. It will then explore alternative intellectual grounds that allow for science and agency to be understood in ways that dissolve the conflict that is commonly assumed to attach each.