Bibliography

Top Resources:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Extensive empathy description)
"Despite its linguistic roots in ancient Greek, the concept of empathy is of recent intellectual heritage. Yet its history has been varied and colorful, a fact that is also mirrored in the multiplicity of definitions associated with the empathy concept in a number of different scientific and non-scientific discourses. In its philosophical heyday at the turn of the 19^th to the 20^th century, empathy had been hailed as the primary means for gaining knowledge of other minds and as the method uniquely suited for the human sciences, only to be almost entirely neglected philosophically for the rest of the century. Only recently have philosophers become again interested in empathy in light of the debate about our folk psychological mind reading capacities."

Answers.com (Extensive empathy description)
Many and extensive definitions. In other languages, sign language, etc. etc.

Dictionary of the History of Ideas (Extensive empathy description)
"Empathy is the idea that the vital properties which we experience in or attribute to any person or object outside ourselves are the projections of our own feelings and thoughts. The idea was first elaborated by Robert Vischer in Das optische Formgefühl (1872) as a psychological theory of art which asserts that because the dynamics of the formal relations in a work of art suggest muscular and emotional attitudes in a viewing subject, that subject experiences those feelings as qualities of the object. Aesthetic pleasure may thus be explained as objectified self-enjoyment in which subject and object are fused."

Swedish Empathy Center  (Many resources, bibliography, articles, etc)

Empathy An Introduction to Empathy 
"What is Empathy, Definition of Empathy and Sympathy, History of Empathy"

Re-examining empathy: a relational-feminist point of view.
"For thousands of years people have been aware of the concept of empathy. In ancient Greece, philosophers expressed their understanding of "empathy" by the word empatheria, which implies an active appreciation of another person's feeling experience (Astin, 1967). In 1910, British psychologist Edward Titchener translated the German word "Einfuhlung" into empathy, literally meaning "to feel oneself into" (Bohart & Greenberg, 1997). In the 1950s, American psychologist Carl Rogers highlighted the importance of empathy in his client-centered approach to working with people. His description of empathy was widely adopted by social workers, giving common voice to its meaning in professional literature. According to Rogers (1951),"

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -  Empathy
Article on empathy from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Has a extensive bibliography,

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
The classical works for the development of empathy in Germany are

Robert Vischer,
Das optische Formgefühl,  reprinted in Drei Schriften zum ästhetischen Formproblem  (Halle, 1927), and

Theodor Lipps,
Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (Leipzig, 1897), and
Ästhetik, 2 vols. (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1903-06; 2nd ed.
1914-20).

Vernon Lee
[Violet Paget], Beauty and Ugliness and other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London and New York, 1912), written with C. Anstruther-Thompson; and
The Beautiful (Cambridge, 1913) are the sources for her
form of the theory.

Herbert Langfeld,
 The Aesthetic Attitude (New York, 1920), is the best introduction in English. The
fullest recent consideration is

David A. Stewart,
Preface to Empathy (New York, 1956).

Shorter selections of Lipps translated into English may be found in E. F. Carritt, Philosophies of Beauty (London and New York, 1930) pp. 252-58;

Melvin Rader,
A Modern Book of Aesthetics, 3rd ed. (New York, 1960), pp. 574-82; and

Karl Aschenbrenner and Arnold Isenberg,
Aesthetic Theories (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), pp. 403-12.

 Wilhelm Worringer,
Abstraction and Empathy (New York, 1953);


Victor Basch
Essai critique sur l'esthétique de Kant (Paris 1927);

 I. Kant,
 Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951), pp. 45-46. Thedevelopment of the method of Verstehen and empathic understanding occurs in Wilhelm Dilthey, Ideen über einer beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie  (Leipzig, 1894); and Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur  Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen, 1920).

 The best short statement and analysis of the idea occurs in Theodore Abel,
 “The Operation Called `Verstehen',” in the American Journal of Sociology, 54 (1948-49), 211-18, reprinted in Edward H. Madden, ed., The Structure of Scientific Thought (Boston, 1960), pp. 158-66. The full reference for Houkom is Alf S. Houkom, “Lucas Foss and Chance Music,” Music: the A.G.O. and R.C.C.O. Magazine, 2, no. 2 (Feb. 1968), 10.
 

COMPASSIONATE COMMUNICATION AND EMPATHY’S AWAKENING
By John Cunningham
About Nonviolent Communication