© 2019 The Aristotelian Society Empathy is ‘first-personal’ in at least two ways. When my brother is on the rack, it is ‘by the imagination’ that I grasp how it is for him, wrote Adam Smith. I imagine him de se, with the indexical first person: I self-ascribe being in that situation, and, more mysteriously, being him in that situation. Moreover, I imagine him subjectively, with a first personal phenomenology that somehow captures what the suffering is like. Subjective and de se imagining are distinct, but have each been heralded as revealing something deep about the first-personal stand-point. I illustrate their distinctness with a story whose combinatorial possibilities also indicate their independence. I suggest that de se and subjective imagining each contribute to empathy’s epistemic and motivational role in ethics. But I partly agree with sceptics who doubt the significance of de se attitudes. The de se requires no ‘person’ in its ‘first personal’, as illustrated by inanimate machines, whose de se ‘attitudes’ include analogues of self-discovery, and of empathy itself. Finally, I defend the mystery in empathic imagining, the ‘auto-alienation’, the seeming-implication that I could be someone else: the perception, or illusion, of the contingency of being me.