“The Very Unrecognizability of the Other”: Edith Stein, Judith Butler, and the Pedagogical Challenge of Empathy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is no standard definition of empathy, but the concept is assumed to be innately pro-social and teachable regardless of factors such as power dynamics or other manifestations of social injustice within a society. Such assumptions in discursive practices, whether academic, popular, or pedagogical, obscure the emergence of two important questions: What does it mean when we cannot empathize with another? And could it be that we may gain greater insight from the examination of empathy’s limits and failures than the hopes we have for its success? Through an exploration of some of Edith Stein’s and Judith Butler’s work on the subject, I propose that discussions of empathy, particularly in education, must be grounded in social context. Once this is done, assumptions about empathy must be continually troubled if one is to have a cogent conversation—whether as a philosopher, social theorist, educator, or policy maker—about what empathy is (or is not) and what it does (or does not) make possible.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.068 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".