Theodor Lipps

Faustino Fabbianelli’s new edited book Theodor Lipps: Schriften zur Einfühlung [Theodor Lipps: Writings on Empathy] is a much-awaited publication. For the first time, any reader interested in Lipps and empathy has at his or her disposal a collection of hitherto hard-to-access texts, most of which have not been previously republished and never gathered together in a single volume. Such a publication is all the more welcome because the editor does not simply compile most of Lipps’s contributions to empathy (Einfühlung) but proposes an authentic critical edition of them: the edited texts are preceded by a long introduction (30 pages: VII–XXXVI) and each is accompanied by a series of endnotes that constitute a substantial philological apparatus. Both the introduction and the endnotes are informative and clearly written, so that, while meeting the required academic standards, they remain accessible to the non-expert reader. Although the volume in question is in German and does not specifically relate to aesthetic empathy, but to the concept of empathy in general, it fully deserves to be reviewed in the present journal insofar as it represents an important step in the rediscovery of Lipps—who has been recently reinstated as a major stakeholder in the history of aesthetics—and in the renewed interest in empathy in current aesthetic research. Here it is worth noting that Fabbianelli, who ranks among the most distinguished of Lipps’s experts, has already published a four-volume edition of Lipps’s psychological and epistemological writings in the same series.1

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