Empatia em tempos de pós-humanismo: um estudo sobre alteridade e compreensão histórica a partir da obra Androides sonham com ovelhas elétricas? (1968)

Abstract

This master's dissertation is an effort to historicize the concept of empathy that was coined at the beginning of the 20th century and that became popular in public debate since the post-war period. I aim to recover the polysemy of its history, filled with translations and retranslations in different moments, languages and disciplinary contexts, in order to rehabilitate it in academic and scientific debates. In the first chapter, I highlight the ideas and discussions held within the fields of Hermeneutics, Moral Philosophy, Aesthetics and areas related to Psychology around the theme of empathy, in order to emphasize the interdisciplinarity of the concept, its confluences and divergences and meaning superimpositions throughout the time. In the second chapter, as an example of the popularity achieved by the concept, I analyze the idea of empathy as it appears in the futuristic, post-apocalyptic and post-human setting of the dystopian novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick. In the third and last chapter, I reflect on empathy as directed to the understanding of the other, to otherness and to intersubjectivity, revealing its (post)humanist relevance. In the wake of recent approaches to Theory and Philosophy of History, I stress the ethical-political turn and the posthumanist trends, understanding empathy as a cognitive-intellectual, affective, ethical political and existential effort to open up to understand the other without having to eliminate or subsume the difference. Finally, I defend empathy as a theoretical device for the cognitive intellectual and affective understanding of the other that, by presupposing the different places of speech and by interacting with the world of the other from an ethical-political-existential stance, is able to displace and reallocate the subject in its own world