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  1. Ethics Without Sentience: Facing Up to the Probable Insignificance of Phenomenal Consciousness.François Kammerer - 2022 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 29 (3-4):180-204.
    Phenomenal consciousness appears to be particularly normatively significant. For this reason, sentience-based conceptions of ethics are widespread. In the field of animal ethics, knowing which animals are sentient appears to be essential to decide the moral status of these animals. I argue that, given that materialism is true of the mind, phenomenal consciousness is probably not particularly normatively significant. We should face up to this probable insignificance of phenomenal consciousness and move towards an ethic without sentience.
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  2. (1 other version)Pain Experiences and Their Link to Action: Challenging Imperative Theories.Sabrina Coninx - 2020 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (9-10):104-126.
    According to pure imperativism, pain experiences are experiences of a specific phenomenal type that are entirely constituted by imperative content. As their primary argument, proponents of imperativism rely on the biological role that pain experiences fulfill, namely, the motivation of actions whose execution ensures the normal functioning of the body. In the paper, I investigate which specific types of action are of relevance for an imperative interpretation and how close their link to pain experiences actually is. I argue that, although (...)
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  3. Does the IASP Definition of Pain Need Updating?Murat Aydede - 2019 - PAIN Reports 4 (5 - e777):1-7.
    The current IASP definition of pain has come under renewed criticisms recently. There is a new momentum for its revision as reflected by the fact that IASP has now a Presidential Task Force dedicated to look into whether there is enough warrant to update the definition. I critically review all the major criticisms of the current definition in detail, and raise new difficulties rarely discussed before. I show that none of the major criticisms has enough warrant to force us to (...)
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  4. Why Take Painkillers?David Bain - 2019 - Noûs 53 (2):462-490.
    Accounts of the nature of unpleasant pain have proliferated over the past decade, but there has been little systematic investigation of which of them can accommodate its badness. This paper is such a study. In its sights are two targets: those who deny the non-instrumental disvalue of pain's unpleasantness; and those who allow it but deny that it can be accommodated by the view—advanced by me and others—that unpleasant pains are interoceptive experiences with evaluative content. Against the former, I argue (...)
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  5. On The Content and Character of Pain Experience.Richard Gray - 2019 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (1):47-68.
    Tracking representationalism explains the negative affective character of pain, and its capacity to motivate action, by reference to the representation of the badness for us of bodily damage. I argue that there is a more fitting instantiation of the tracking relation – the badness for us of extremely intense stimuli – and use this to motivate a non-reductive approach to the negative affective character of pain. The view of pain proposed here is supported by consideration of three related topics: the (...)
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  6. Can Evaluativism about unpleasant pains meet the normative condition?Jonathan Mitchell - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (7):779-802.
    ABSTRACTThis paper assesses whether Evaluativism, as a view about the nature of unpleasant pains, can meet a specific normative condition. The normative condition says whatever candidate state is offered as an analysis of unpleasant pain should be intrinsically phenomenally bad for its subject to be in. I first articulate a method reflecting this condition, called the normative contrast method, and then frame Evaluativism in detail. The view is then tested through this method. I show that Evaluativism can explain why cases (...)
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  7. Bayesian Learning Models of Pain: A Call to Action.Abby Tabor & Christopher Burr - 2019 - Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 26:54-61.
    Learning is fundamentally about action, enabling the successful navigation of a changing and uncertain environment. The experience of pain is central to this process, indicating the need for a change in action so as to mitigate potential threat to bodily integrity. This review considers the application of Bayesian models of learning in pain that inherently accommodate uncertainty and action, which, we shall propose are essential in understanding learning in both acute and persistent cases of pain.
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  8. Recently introduced IASP definition of ‘nociplastic pain’ needs better formulation.Murat Aydede & Adam Shriver - 2018 - PAIN 159:1176–77.
    This is a Letter to Editor of _Pain_ recommending revision of a pain term ('nociplastic pain') recently added to the IASP Pain Terms. (With a response from the Taxonomy Committee, Eva Kosek et al. PAIN: June 2018 - Volume 159 - Issue 6 - p 1177–1178.
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  9. The Philosophy of Pain - Introduction.David Bain, Jennifer Corns & Michael Brady - 2018 - In David Bain, Michael Brady & Jennifer Corns (eds.), Philosophy of Pain. London: Routledge.
    Over recent decades, pain has received increasing attention as – with ever greater sophistication and rigour – theorists have tried to answer the deep and difficult questions it poses. What is pain’s nature? What is its point? In what sense is it bad? The papers collected in this volume are a contribution to that effort ...
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  10. The unpleasantness of pain.Abraham Sapien - 2018 - Dissertation,
    In this thesis I provide an account of the unpleasantness of pain. In doing this, I shed light on the nature of pain and unpleasantness. I propose to understand the unpleasantness of pain based on the determinable-determinate distinction. Unpleasantness is a determinable phenomenal property of mental states that entails badness. I propose that an unpleasant pain experience has two phenomenal properties: i) the phenomenal property of being a pain, and ii) a phenomenal determinate property (u1, u2, u3, etc.) of the (...)
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  11. Defending the IASP Definition of Pain.Murat Aydede - 2017 - The Monist 100 (4):439–464.
    The official definition of ‘pain’ by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) hasn’t seen much revision since its publication in 1979. There have been various criticisms of the definition in the literature from different quarters: that the definition implies a dubious metaphysical dualism, that it requires a strong form of consciousness as well as linguistic abilities, that it excludes many vulnerable groups that are otherwise perfectly capable of experiencing pain, that it has therefore unacceptable practical as well (...)
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  12. Evaluativist Accounts of Pain's Unpleasantness.David Bain - 2017 - In Jennifer Corns (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain. New York: Routledge. pp. 40-50.
    Evaluativism is best thought of as a way of enriching a perceptual view of pain to account for pain’s unpleasantness or painfulness. Once it was common for philosophers to contrast pains with perceptual experiences (McGinn 1982; Rorty 1980). It was thought that perceptual experiences were intentional (or content-bearing, or about something), whereas pains were representationally blank. But today many of us reject this contrast. For us, your having a pain in your toe is a matter not of your sensing “pain-ly” (...)
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  13. The meaning of pain expressions and pain communication.Emma Borg, Tim Salomons & Nat Hansen - 2017 - In Simon van Rysewyk (ed.), Meanings of Pain. Springer. pp. 261-282.
    Both patients and clinicians frequently report problems around communicating and assessing pain. Patients express dissatisfaction with their doctors and doctors often find exchanges with chronic pain patients difficult and frustrating. This chapter thus asks how we could improve pain communication and thereby enhance outcomes for chronic pain patients. We argue that improving matters will require a better appreciation of the complex meaning of pain terms and of the variability and flexibility in how individuals think about pain. We start by examining (...)
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  14. When Pain Isn't Painful.David Bain - 2015 - The Philosophers' Magazine 3.
    Sometimes the philosophical armchair gets bumped by empirical facts. So it is when thinking about pain. For good or ill (good, actually, as we shall see) most of us are intimately acquainted with physical pain, the kind you feel when you stand on a nail or burn your hand. And, from the armchair, it can seem blindingly obvious that pain is essentially unpleasant. There are of course unpleasant experiences that aren’t pains – nausea or itches, for example – but surely (...)
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  15. Mucius Scaevola and the Essence of Manly Patientia.Jula Wildberger - 2015 - Antiquorum Philosophia 9:27-39.
    Patientia, the virtue of enduring physiological pain, poses a problem for Roman elite masculinities. The male body is supposed to be unpenetrated, but when pain is inflicted the body is often cut and pierced. This paper looks at literary and philosophical representations of the moral exemplar Mucius Scaevola to see how Roman writers and philosophers deal with this dilemma.
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  16. Pains that Don't Hurt.David Bain - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (2):305-320.
    Pain asymbolia is a rare condition caused by brain damage, usually in adulthood. Asymbolics feel pain but appear indifferent to it, and indifferent also to visual and verbal threats. How should we make sense of this? Nikola Grahek thinks asymbolics’ pains are abnormal, lacking a component that make normal pains unpleasant and motivating. Colin Klein thinks that what is abnormal is not asymbolics’ pains, but asymbolics: they have a psychological deficit making them unresponsive to unpleasant pain. I argue that an (...)
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  17. Pain, Pleasure, and Unpleasure.David Bain & Michael Brady - 2014 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (1):1-14.
    Compare your pain when immersing your hand in freezing water and your pleasure when you taste your favourite wine. The relationship seems obvious. Your pain experience is unpleasant, aversive, negative, and bad. Your experience of the wine is pleasant, attractive, positive, and good. Pain and pleasure are straightforwardly opposites. Or that, at any rate, can seem beyond doubt, and to leave little more to be said. But, in fact, it is not beyond doubt. And, true or false, it leaves a (...)
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  18. What makes pains unpleasant?David Bain - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (1):69-89.
    The unpleasantness of pain motivates action. Hence many philosophers have doubted that it can be accounted for purely in terms of pain’s possession of indicative representational content. Instead, they have explained it in terms of subjects’ inclinations to stop their pains, or in terms of pain’s imperative content. I claim that such “noncognitivist” accounts fail to accommodate unpleasant pain’s reason-giving force. What is needed, I argue, is a view on which pains are unpleasant, motivate, and provide reasons in virtue of (...)
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  19. (2 other versions)Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study, edited by Murat Aydede. [REVIEW]David Bain - 2010 - Mind 119 (474):451-456.
    Our preoccupation with pain can seem an eccentricity of philosophers. But just a little reflection leads one into the thickets. When I see a pencil on my desk, I’m aware of a physical thing and its objective properties; but what am I aware of when I feel a pain in my toe? A pain, perhaps? Or my toe’s hurting? But what is the nature of such things? Are they physical? Are they objective? To avoid unexperienced pains, we might say they (...)
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  20. The Ambiguity of "Pain".S. Benjamin Fink - 2010 - In Jane Fernandez-Goldborough (ed.), Making Sense of: Pain. Inter-disciplinary Net.
    I argue that the understanding of "pain" as presented in the official medical definition by the IASP is ambiguous and likely a cluster concept.
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  21. The location of pains.David Bain - 2007 - Philosophical Papers 36 (2):171-205.
    Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a pair of objections—due to (...)
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