Abstract

In this paper, I provide a rich account of the mental content representing the intentionality of empathic emotion in cases concerning activist art. At the core of this account is a distinction between intentional content and what I call mediating content. Intentional content is, with regard to empathic emotion, a proposition referring to the relationship between the emotion empathised with and its intentional object. Mediating content is a proposition representing the emotion empathised with which also attributes that emotion to the person empathised with. I argue that this distinction is necessary to account for when a person’s affective empathy is provoked by activist art. This is because the emotion empathised with is, in such cases, not per se an actually occurring emotion. I suggest that the emotion empathised with is instead a hypothetical emotion which attributes to a description of the people within the situations symbolised by activist art.