Sources of the modern idea of sympathy

Shaftesbury

Abstract

Although in a scattered way, in Shaftesbury’s work the phenomena we usually understand under the emblem of sympathy are presented in a sufficiently broad way. Although Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith, mainly, will carry out a systematic characterization of the idea of sympathy, the basic meanings of this idea are already evident in Shaftesbury’s writings. But, beyond the role that the concept of sympathy occupies in the foundation of moral life carried out by the English thinker, his characterization of the sympathetic will offer modern to thought two significant turns that are rarely mentioned: one, in the treatment of affectivity as a way of knowing; the other, in an unprecedented understanding of intersubjectivity that, unpredictably, is more indebted to Spinoza than to Locke.