 The idea that we often arrive at representing other people’s mental states by mentally simulating those states in ourselves has a distinguished history in philosophy and the human sciences. Robert Gordon (1995) traces it back to David Hume (1739) and Adam Smith’s (1759) notion of sympathy; Jane Heal (2003) and Gordon (2000) find simulationist themes in the Verstehen approach to the philosophy of history (e.g., Dilthey 1894); Alvin Goldman (2006) considers Theodor Lipps’s (1903) account of empathy (Einfühlung) as a precursor of the notion of mental simulation.