The interesting thing about the word "empathy" is that its original meaning comes from the German word "Einfühlung" (feeling-into), which was translated into ancient Greek and translated again (or actually more being adapted) to English. Along this way a lot of additional meanings were put into this word (to paraphrase a professor of mine), the biggest one probably being "understanding". Which is kind of ironic, since one of the inventors of this term, Robert Vischer, distinguished between "feeling-into" and "understanding". It is worth noticing that he was also an art historian and I guess that influenced this distinction. Before I'm losing track here, mirror neurons seem to be a necessary condition for empathy, but they seem to be mostly involved when seeing empathy as "understanding" and not empathy as "feeling-into".

And thank you very much for your kind words :)