According to Edith Stein, empathy is “the experience of foreign consciousness in general, irrespective of the kind of the experiencing subject or of the subject whose consciousness is experienced (p. 11).”
I constantly go back to this definition of empathy because I believe, and obviously, it is crucial for my thesis. The Steinian definition of empathy given above is broad. It is probably because Edith Stein was establishing it as an act revealing the presence of other individuals. Precisely, this is the background in which Stein explored empathy. It was the fact that, as Stein pointed out in her dissertation, the subject has an awareness of other individuals. How this is so, the act of empathy is the answer. So, for Stein, regardless of the nature of the subjects, the knowledge and experience they have with each other are based on the act of empathy.
*All of the above is based on Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy.
Empathy 