The Way to a Definition

‘The Way to a Definition’ offers a clear-cut definition of empathy thanks to a descriptive, genealogical, and conceptual reconstruction of this phenomenon which is based especially on the phenomenological views on empathy by Edith Stein. It is shown how the proposed definition is able to accommodate the perspectives of the old and new exponents of the phenomenological tradition with the Smithian-derived idea widely present in many modern scholars of empathy who see, unlike the phenomenologists, imagination as the basis of this phenomenon.