"Empathy," Ender began, "Is a skill that is fundamentally neutral in nature. We like to perceive it as 'good' - as if to understand another means we will immediately be kind as well. But those two concepts are completely separate from one another. You can be violently emphatic and yet utterly violent to someone at the same time."

Hem.

"Over the years, many philosophers have busied themselves with the study of what empathy truly is, and whether we should care for it," he said. "For instance, Nietzsche, ever cheerful, described empathy as 'to imitate another's feelings within ourselves'. To act on it with compassion was little more than putting a pretty face on pity."

He picked up his bottle of water. "Meanwhile, Edmund Husserl sees empathy as a form of awareness; an intention to observe the feelings of those around you, and being able to do so without necessarily having experienced or experiencing those feelings yourself. He sees a difference between this kind of intentional, intuitive observation and the observations of science. We see the other person as another person, not as a thing to be studied, when we practice empathy."

He took a sip of his water and sat back. "Nietzsche gets at the heart of something called simulation theory: the idea that empathy is what happens when we observe an emotion and try to reproduce it in ourselves, so we might understand the other person. Theory of Mind, on the other hand, is the idea that we all have some rules in our minds for how people ought to think and feel, and we practice empathy by applying those rules to another person and coming to a conclusion. This is also known as 'cognitive empathy'."

"How do you feel when you emphatize with someone else?" he asked. "Do you do it cognitively, reasoning through why they must feel that way? Do you attempt to reproduce what they might be feeling? Or do you simply observe and assume? Can you remember a moment where you looked at another person and knew, intimately, how they felt and why? What is empathy to you?"

Today, one would find Ender on the lawn with his legs beneath him, his implacable calm restored from where it had wobbled over the weekend.

"One day, sometime in the early 17th century, the French philosopher called René Descartes set himself to a nigh impossible task," he began. "He realized that over the years he had believed many things he had come to feel were false, and wondered how many more he'd come to dispute. And so he decided to be proactive about it. 'I needed — just once in my life — to demolish everything completely and start again from the foundations', he would later write. He feared that if he kept waiting for the right moment, he'd be too old to do it properly."

He reached for a bottle of water, unscrewing the cap. "Once he settled with the thought, he realized he didn't need to fundamentally disprove each of his opinions to do so. It would be a lot of work, and all he really needed was to somehow undo the foundation of each. ' So all I need, for the purpose of rejecting all my opinions, is to find in each of them at least some reason for doubt', he concluded. And so he began to dig down, further and further, finding reason to doubt the very fundamentals of his beliefs, and in the end, realized there was only one thing he could not disprove to some extent - that he existed, for as long as he thought about anything at all, he had to exist."

Ender's mouth curved. "Or as it's been phrased in the public imagination, 'I think, therefor I am'. But Descartes' experiment provides more food for thought than merely that. He challenges us to think about what undergirds our beliefs, to accept that they might not be correct. Humanity, at least, has a habit of questioning everything, except for their most intrinsic, most elementary convictions."

He took a sip. "Now I'm hardly foolish enough to believe we can dig down and upend yours in a single class," he said. "First of all, I would like you to think - and discuss - what you feel is one unshakable idea you have about the world and the self. Secondly, I would like to ask you to spend this week trying, if not entirely, at least a fraction of what Descartes did: to find a reason to doubt this idea. And we'll speak of it next week."

"'Anger is accompanied by pain, but hatred not; for he who is angry suffers pain, but he who hates does not. One who is angry might feel compassion in many cases, but one who hates, never; for the former wishes that the object of his anger should suffer in his turn, the latter, that he should perish.'"

Ender smiled as the class settled in, a copy of the Complete Works of Aristotle sitting in his lap. "Aristotle is one of this world's most famous philosophers. One of the ancient Greeks, who lived almost 2.500 years ago, taught by the legendary Plato. And a man with a lot of things to say about hatred."

He closed the book. "Aristotle sees a clear difference between anger and hate. Anger, he argues, is focused on the individual. In doing so, you must acknowledge the humanity - or sentience - of the being you feel such anger towards. You feel, and you want the object of your anger to feel as well. Hatred, on the other hand, is different. Hatred can also be about groups, says Aristotle, about a collection of things you wish only to be utterly destroyed. The object of your hatred need not feel something. It is only imperative that it be there to be mistreated, hurt, annihilated."

He set the book aside. "Hence, to feel hatred, you must have stripped the recipient of all that makes their feelings worth caring about," he said. "When I was young, I thought my brother hated me. I had something he didn't, and he wanted to destroy me for it. Only when I was older did I find the capacity to listen enough, and did he find the capacity to speak enough, for me to realize that he was simply fearful, and wanted my affection."

The annoyance of the weekend had passed, yes. Peter had called, and Ender had realized what all of that had been about. "In doing so, I denied his humanity, as much as I felt he denied mine," he said. "I was young. I didn't understand. Much like I was a few years later, when I felt a measure of hatred for the first time in my life, and paid the cost. It takes effort to put your feelings aside and listen. It takes more effort to understand that there's a reason to do so at all."

He reached for his bottle of water. "Don't get me wrong, anger can also be destructive," he said. "But personally I don't think it is as all encompassing." He took a sip. "So two questions, today. One, do you think Aristotle's division of anger and hatred is fair? And two, can you remember a time you felt hatred - and a time you felt someone hated you? What did you do about it? How did it feel? Do you regret it, or do you stand by it?"

"It is customary for us to do at least one class every half-semester that equates to 'free space' on the bingo card," Ender said wryly, "And after such an uneventful half-a-summer, it feels only right that it be this final class."

He stretched his legs out.

"How do you look back on the discussions we've had?" he said. "Or is there something we haven't discussed that you hoped we would have? Is there something else you'd like to throw into the group that you think we should all talk about? I leave it up to you."

"We've been blessed with relative peace of late," Ender said, his legs folded under him, the remains of a sandwich beside him. "Still, this is Fandom. I'm sure most of you will have woken up at some point or another looking like someone else, or feeling like someone else. It can be a bewildering experience. Or freeing."

He reached for his water. "The great philosophers spent a lot of time talking about matters of personal identity," he said. "Some philosophers denote identity simply as bodily existence: you are who you are as long as you are your physical self. Of course, that brings issues of its own with it, whether it be because of the natural process of aging, or because the island turned you into another sex. Are you still yourself, when your genitals are different? I would say yes, but it's a frequent topic of debate."

He set the bottle back down. "The second theory is that identity is a product of mental substance; that one's mind is separate from one's body, and that it is where our personhood lives. So if we wake up one morning forgetting who we are, then whatever inhabits our body is not us. Whatever that body did was not our action."

He eyed each student in turn. "Of course, John Locke went a step further and defined mental substance as being one's consciousness, in which case the answer is rather more clear-cut, I feel. 'If Socrates and the present mayor of Queenborough agree, they are the same person: if the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same person.'"

"But there are many other theories. One presupposes that one's self is really one's intuition: after all, when your mind is gone, and someone then proceeds to torture you, you'll still feel fear and apprehension, because you can intuit that torture isn't something you want happening to you. Other theories suppose that consistency is key, that every part of you that I've just mentioned must remain in a certain alignment for you to be you. And so on, and so forth."

He smiled, tapping his finger against the bottle. "But that's enough for Philosophy 101," he said. "Have any of you ever experienced waking up in another body? Or with another mind? Did you remember what you did? Did it mean anything to you, or could you put some distance between it and yourself?"

"And now we arrive at the point in this series of classes where I start dragging old philosophers into it," Ender said, wryly, as he sat down on the law with his sandwich.

"But I think this might be an interesting one with this group," he added. "Specifically, I'd like to talk about justice. When is it okay to judge something terrible or evil? The philosophers of yore developed extensive theories on what made something good and right. Take the old Greeks, such as Socrates and Aristotle, who believed in what's called 'virtue ethics' - the idea that the character of the person defines the morality of his actions. Socrates argued, for instance, that if a person knew what was right, then he would do right. It was only not knowing what 'good' was that might cause someone to do evil."

( Then there were the stoics... )

"As I said, we all make our judgments. Of ourselves, of the people around us, of their pasts - especially around here. On what do you base your judgments? I think most of us realize that there is no such thing as pure good and evil - but how we judge other people tends to depend a lot on what we were taught and where we come from."

Another faint smile.

"I personally believe that character is important," he said. "Once you try to understand what makes people do what they do, it becomes that much harder to see them as evil. After all, most of us do what we think is right, even if our ideas of what right is are different." He gave a little shrug. "But of course I feel that way. I'm a Speaker for the Dead. It is, in many ways, our raison d'etre to value human understanding of the self above all else."

It had always been Ender's wont to have this class meet on the school's lawn, in the sunlight. There were pillows and picnic blankets, simple sandwiches and thermoses of coffee, tea and water. He was already there when class arrived, looking content to sit and enjoy the feeling of the wind in his hair.

"Sit down in a circle, please," he said when class arrived. "I like to keep things equal, when I can at all help it."

There were quite a few familiar faces here. "Most of you know who I am," he observed. "For the rest of you, my name is Andrew Skywalker. Dean Skywalker," he nodded at Anakin, "is my grandfather-in-law, and Ben here," another nod, and a smile, "is my husband and father to our three children. I'm sorry, sometimes it's hard to escape making something on this island a family affair. Especially when you are an alumnus."

He looked at the students he didn't know. "I am a Speaker for the Dead," he said. "When someone dies, and I am summoned, it's my job to poke and pry into the life of the deceased, to learn about the decisions they made and why they made them, so we can form a true picture of a person without claims to higher judgment. I'm not here to teach you how to be a Speaker, obviously, but this is the lens through which I try to conduct this class: we ask questions. Sometimes we pose hypotheses. But I won't tolerate harsh judgments, because they close the blinders on us, and make it harder for us to understand both ourselves and the world."

"While 'philosophy' is in my class's title, we're not here to talk about the philosophers of old or the specifics of particular lines of thought in philosophy. Here, we make some attempt to put our own experiences into a greater perspective through conversation and debate. Above all, philosophy is about asking questions about everything in the world around us - and about everything we feel about it. That means I expect some level of participation from all of you."

He smiled wryly. "That doesn't mean you always need to speak up about yourself," he said. "No topics are everything to everyone. If that week's subject veers too close to something you want to keep private, be my guest - just try and pitch in when someone else speaks. I'll try to raise a theme each week, but don't feel beholden to it. If there's something on your mind you'd like to discuss, please do throw it into the group."

He picked up a bottle of water. "So let's talk," he said, twisting off the cap. "How do you feel about where you are now? What kind of experience has the island been for you? Has there been anything that made you cry or made you think or made you wonder?" He glanced at Ghanima and Anakin with a wry curl to his mouth. "Perhaps I should say 'in the past five years', just to give ourselves some kind of a limitation."

"'The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely opinion'," Ender quoted, once the last of his students had settled in on the lawn. "If you did the reading I assigned a few weeks ago, you'll know that quote from the Greek philosopher Democritus. If you didn't, for instance because you were stuck in a hole, well, I won't dock points."

He smiled briefly, then reached for a bottle of water.

"Like many of the famous old Greeks, Democritus concerned himself with many areas of study, from physics to mathematics. But he also dabbled in philosophy." His mouth curved. "Actually, they called him 'The Laughing Philosopher', because he 'laughed at humanity's follies', which should tell you a thing or two about the man."

He took a sip of water.

"Democritus believed it was almost impossible to know the truth. After all, we see the world through our senses, which he felt were innately subjective. Who's to say the color 'purple' looks the same to your eyes as they do to a friend's? He called this 'bastard' knowing: to know only through the senses. Real truth can only be attained through reason."

Another sip, then he set it down. "We're all from different universes with different rules, we're all people with different perceptions and different experiences," he said. "What's true to you can be quite fundamentally untrue to your friend from another universe where purple is a little yellow, actually. And still, here at Fandom, we manage to relate ourselves to people who are so very different from ourselves. In a way, I suppose, we collectively come together to decide on what we think is true, and we live by that."

He shrugged. "Of course, Democritus also pointed out that we can reason our way into beautiful theories about the state of the universe, but the only way to confirm those theories is to see them with our imperfect senses." He sat back. "Have you befriended anyone, or seen another universe, that made you question whether your own perceptions are true? Do you think Democritus is right, or is there such a thing as real truth?" he said. "Does it even matter?"

All of Ender's new students received an email that morning, if they were still capable of receiving any at all.

As you may know, my class centers around discussion. Without pupils, it's hard to discuss anything.

Enclosed you'll find a digital copy of a book about the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus. Once we're able to meet in person again, we'll talk about his ideas about truth.

For now, I hope you and yours are safe. I will be doing my best to ensure the same on my end.

Regards,
Andrew Skywalker.

[[ no ocd, open to reactions and/or counter-emails ]]

There was an Ender sitting on the lawn, along with his customary sandwiches and drinks. He wasn't looking at them, though.

He was on his back, looking up at the sky.

"People arrive here from all corners of the multiverse," he said, once everyone had settled in. "From the medieval and further part, to places so far in the future we can barely dream of them. For me, growing up, space was an unknown danger where evil aliens lurked; it was a place I lived and learned and suffered, with zero gravity as familiar to me as the regular kind."

That was about as much as any of them were ever likely to hear about Ender.

"Coming here, where our feet were rooted to the ground and space was merely an unknown - that was strange. I had to adjust my being to the place I was in, and its new rules."

He considered a passing cloud.

"It makes you wonder how much the simple geography of our early days shapes us," he said. "For some of you, this might be the first steps you take outside of the world you knew. For others, that sensation might be familiar. Banal, even. Has coming here changed you? Has going somewhere else before that changed you instead? How much of who you are now is intrinsically linked to the place you first consciously existed in?"