Philosophy of Pain
Philosophy of Pain

Author: David Bain

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-07-11

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1351115847

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Over recent decades, pain has received increasing attention as philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists try to answer deep and difficult questions about it. What is pain? What makes pain unpleasant? How is pain related to the emotions? This volume provides a rich and wide-ranging exploration of these questions and important new insights into the philosophy of pain. Divided into three clear sections – pain and motivation, pain and emotion, and deviant pain – the collection covers fundamental topics in the philosophy and psychology of pain. These include pain and sensory affect, the neuroscience of pain, pain and rationality, placebos, and pain and consciousness. Philosophy of Pain: Unpleasantness, Emotion, and Deviance is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, cognitive and behavioral psychology, as well as those in health and medicine researching conceptual issues in pain.

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain

Author: Jennifer Corns

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-07-14

Total Pages: 477

ISBN-13: 1317585461

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The phenomenon of pain presents problems and puzzles for philosophers who want to understand its nature. Though pain might seem simple, there has been disagreement since Aristotle about whether pain is an emotion, sensation, perception, or disturbed state of the body. Despite advances in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine, pain is still poorly understood and multiple theories of pain abound. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting and interdisciplinary subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into nine clear parts: Modeling pain in philosophy Modeling pain in neuroscience Modeling pain in psychology Pain in philosophy of mind Pain in epistemology Pain in philosophy of religion Pain in ethics Pain in medicine Pain in law As well as fundamental topics in the philosophy of pain such as the nature, role, and value of pain, many other important topics are covered including the neurological pathways involved in pain processing; biopsychosocial and cognitive-behavioural models of pain; chronic pain; pain and non-human animals; pain and knowledge; controlled substances for pain; pain and placebo effects; and pain and physician-assisted suicide. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and ethics. It will also be very useful to researchers of pain from any field, especially those in psychology, medicine, and health studies.

A Philosophy of Pain
A Philosophy of Pain

Author: Arne Vetlesen

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2009-09-15

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1861897006

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“Living involves being exposed to pain every second—not necessarily as an insistent reality, but always as a possibility,” writes Arne Vetlesen in A Philosophy of Pain, a thought-provoking look at an inevitable and essential aspect of the human condition. Here, Vetlesen addresses pain in many forms, including the pain inflicted during torture; the pain suffered in disease; the pain accompanying anxiety, grief, and depression; and the pain brought by violence. He examines the dual nature of pain: how we attempt to avoid it as much as possible in our daily lives, and yet conversely, we obtain a thrill from seeking it. Vetlesen’s analysis of pain is revealing, plumbing the very center of many of our most intense and complicated emotions. He looks at pain within different arenas of modern life such as family and work, and he specifically probes at a very common modern phenomenon, the idea of pushing oneself to the limit. Engaging throughout with the ideas of thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Alice Miller, Susan Sontag, and Melanie Klein, A Philosophy of Pain asks which came first, thinking or feeling, and explores the concept and possibility of empathy. Vetlesen offers an original and insightful perspective on something that all of us suffer and endure—from a sprained ankle to a broken heart. Although pain is in itself unpleasant, our ability to feel it reminds us that we are alive.

What the Body Commands
What the Body Commands

Author: Colin Klein

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2015-07-31

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0262029707

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A novel theory of pain, according to which pains are imperatives—commands issued by the body, ordering you to protect the injured part. In What the Body Commands, Colin Klein proposes and defends a novel theory of pain. Klein argues that pains are imperative; they are sensations with a content, and that content is a command to protect the injured part of the body. He terms this view “imperativism about pain,” and argues that imperativism can account for two puzzling features of pain: its strong motivating power and its uninformative nature. Klein argues that the biological purpose of pain is homeostatic; like hunger and thirst, pain helps solve a challenge to bodily integrity. It does so by motivating you to act in ways that help the body recover. If you obey pain's command, you get better (in ordinary circumstances). He develops his account to handle a variety of pain phenomena and applies it to solve a number of historically puzzling cases. Klein's intent is to defend the imperativist view in a pure form—without requiring pain to represent facts about the world. Klein presents a model of imperative content showing that intrinsically motivating sensations are best understood as imperatives, and argues that pain belongs to this class. He considers the distinction between pain and suffering; explains how pain motivates; addresses variations among pains; and offers an imperativist account of maladaptive pains, pains that don't appear to hurt, masochism, and why pain feels bad.

Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, second edition
Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, second edition

Author: Nikola Grahek

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011-12-16

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 0262262959

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An examination of the two most radical dissociation syndromes of the human pain experience—pain without painfulness and painfulness without pain—and what they reveal about the complex nature of pain and its sensory, cognitive, and behavioral components. In Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, Nikola Grahek examines two of the most radical dissociation syndromes to be found in human pain experience: pain without painfulness and painfulness without pain. Grahek shows that these two syndromes—the complete dissociation of the sensory dimension of pain from its affective, cognitive, and behavioral components, and its opposite, the dissociation of pain's affective components from its sensory-discriminative components (inconceivable to most of us but documented by ample clinical evidence)—have much to teach us about the true nature and structure of human pain experience. Grahek explains the crucial distinction between feeling pain and being in pain, defending it on both conceptual and empirical grounds. He argues that the two dissociative syndromes reveal the complexity of the human pain experience: its major components, the role they play in overall pain experience, the way they work together, and the basic neural structures and mechanisms that subserve them. Feeling Pain and Being in Pain does not offer another philosophical theory of pain that conclusively supports or definitively refutes either subjectivist or objectivist assumptions in the philosophy of mind. Instead, Grahek calls for a less doctrinaire and more balanced approach to the study of mind–brain phenomena.

The Culture of Pain
The Culture of Pain

Author: David B. Morris

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1991-09-09

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780520913820

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This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe--as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought--that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to navigate.

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

Author: Elaine Scarry

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1985-09-26

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0195036018

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Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

Philosophy of Suffering
Philosophy of Suffering

Author: David Bain

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-02

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1351115448

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Suffering is a central component of our lives. We suffer pain. We fall ill. We fail and are failed. Our loved ones die. It is a commonplace to think that suffering is, always and everywhere, bad. But might suffering also be good? If so, in what ways might suffering have positive, as well as negative, value? This important volume examines these questions and is the first comprehensive examination of suffering from a philosophical perspective. An outstanding roster of international contributors explore the nature of suffering, pain, and valence, as well as the value of suffering and the relationships between suffering, morality, and rationality. Philosophy of Suffering: Metaphysics, Value, and Normativity is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, cognitive and behavioral psychology as well as those in health and medicine researching conceptual issues regarding suffering and pain.

The Complex Reality of Pain
The Complex Reality of Pain

Author: Jennifer Corns

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-01-16

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1000027902

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This book employs contemporary philosophy, scientific research, and clinical reports to argue that pain, though real, is not an appropriate object of scientific generalisations or an appropriate target for medical intervention. Each pain experience is instead complex and idiosyncratic in a way which undermines scientific utility. In addition to contributing novel arguments and developing a novel position on the nature of pain, the book provides an interdisciplinary overview of dominant models of pain. The author lays the needed groundwork for improved models and targeted treatments at a time when pain science, pain medicine, and philosophy are explicitly searching for both and failing to find them. The Complex Reality of Pain will be of interest to a broad range of researchers and students, including those working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, cognitive science, neuroscience, medicine, health, cognitive and behavioural psychology, and pain science.

The Problem of Animal Pain
The Problem of Animal Pain

Author: T. Dougherty

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-07-22

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1137443170

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Animal suffering constitutes perhaps the greatest challenge to rational belief in the existence of God. Considerations that render human suffering theologically intelligible seem inapplicable to animal suffering. In this book, Dougherty defends radical possibilities for animal afterlife that allow a soul-making theodicy to apply to their case.