Pain

Anaxagoras is notorious for his view that every perception is accompanied by pain but not all concurrent pains are distinctly felt by the perceiving subject. This thesis is reported and criticized by Aristotle’s heir Theophrastus in his De Sensibus. Traditionally, scholars believe that he rejects Anaxagoras’s these of the ubiquity of pain as counterintuitive, with the appeal to unfelt pain looking like a desperate category mistake given that pain is nothing but a feeling. Contra the traditional view, this paper argues (...) that Theophrastus neither aims to defend ordinary phenomenology nor is he bothered by the concept of unfelt pain; instead, he develops a series of new Aristotelian arguments to defend a controversial, optimistic picture about the distribution of affective qualities in animal life. More than a supplement to Aristotle’s psychology, his engagement with Anaxagoras reveals an important yet often ignored ethical concern behind the Peripatetic philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Analgesia and amnesia represent two complimentary pillars of anesthesia directed, respectively, at mitigating the experience of pain and the processes of encoding that experience into memory. These elements are typically combined in modern anesthetic techniques, but some circumstances exist – such as conscious sedation – in which the conditions of amnesia are satisfied while analgesia plays an auxiliary and often incomplete role. These activities reflect a widely held yet underrecognized belief in clinical practice that although pain experiences may be short-lived, (...) their representation in memory and its subsequent effects on thought and emotion can have enduring consequences for patients. In this exploratory article, we delineate phenomenal and abstract ontological categories of pain experience; advance a claim that they are treated by analgesic and amnestic agents, respectively; and describe how each class of experience is uniquely able to bring about individual harm. Beginning with the question of how it can be permissible to allow any preventable experiences or memories of pain, we identify that both phenomenal and abstract pain manifest on a spectrum of severity, each with an enigmatic threshold – unique to circumstance and individual – that determines whether or not pain will translate into harm, and what permissions therefore surround its treatment. Ultimately, we find that there are compelling physiological reasons for the concurrent use of analgesics and amnestics when pain experience exceeds these thresholds, while the treatment of “sub-threshold” experience in either class is a purely ethical imperative to be balanced with considerations of the potential harms posed by the treatments themselves. (shrink)

Materialists say sensations and other kinds of mental states are physical events. Today, most materialists are neural materialists. They think mental states are neural events or material properties of neural events.Orthodox neural materialists think mental states are neural events or orthodox material properties of neutral events. Orthodox material properties are defining properties of the physical. A defining property of the physical is a type of property that provides a necessary condition for something's being correctly termed ‘physical’ Defining properties of the (...) physical include spatial and temporal properties and causal propensities and sensitivities. A particle is an electron, for instance, by having a particular set of spatiotemporal properties and causal sensitivities and powers. (shrink)

Why are pains bad for us? A natural answer is that it is just because of how they feel (or their felt-qualities). But this answer is cast into doubt by cases of people who are unbothered by certain pains of theirs. These pains retain their felt-qualities, but do not seem bad for the people in question. In this paper, I offer a new response to this problem. I argue that in such cases, the pains in question have become ‘just more (...) of the same’, and for this reason have ceased to be bad for the relevant individuals. It is because they (implicitly) recognise this that they are unbothered by such pains. (shrink)

The Complex Reality of Pain, by CornsJennifer. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. xi + 217.

Metaphors are central in communication and sense-making processes in health-related contexts. Yet how the metaphors used by health-care-professionals to make sense of their patients and their relations to them are associated to the perceived valence of their clinical encounters is underexplored. Drawing-upon the ABC Model of Dehumanization, this study investigated how the humanizing or dehumanizing metaphors nurses’ use for making sense of their pain patients are associated with how they perceived their relationships with them. Fifty female nurses undertook individual narrative-episodic (...) interviews about easy/difficult cases in pain care. A content analysis classified the metaphors, identifying eight classes reflecting different types of patients (de)humanization. A multiple correspondence analysis extracted patterns of metaphors and their association with the perceived characteristics of the patient-nurse relationship. It showed how these patterns were not associated with patient sex or socioeconomic status (SES) but were related to the perceived valence of the clinical relationship. By uncovering how patient metaphors guide nurses’ sense-making and potentially modulate interactions in clinical encounters, these findings may contribute to improve quality of pain care. (shrink)

According to Schopenhauer’s compensation argument for pessimism, the non-existence of the world is preferable to its existence because no goods can ever compensate for the mere existence of evil. Standard interpretations take this argument to be based on Schopenhauer’s thesis that all goods are merely the negation of evils, from which they assume it follows that the apparent goods in life are in fact empty and without value. This article develops a non-standard variant of the standard interpretation, which accepts the (...) relevance of the negativity thesis but rejects that the argument assumes that life’s goods are all empty and valueless. Instead, it argues that whatever value negative goods might possess, they do not have the kind of value to compensate for positive evils. This involves additional development of the negativity thesis and a defence of it against objections from Byron Simmons (2021). (shrink)

One popular description of current society is that it is a depressed society and medical evidence about depression’s prevalence may well make such an estimation plausible. However, such normative-critical assessments surrounding depression have to date usually operated with a one-sided understanding of depression. This understanding widely neglects the various ways depression manifests as well as its comorbidities. This becomes evident at the latest when considering one of depression’s most prominent and well-known comorbidities: chronic pain. Against this background, we aim in (...) this article to substantiate our leading claim that the phenomenal interconnection between depression and chronic pain must be acknowledged in the global diagnosis of a depressive society. Thus, we argue here for a complementation of the dominant interpretation of a depressed society. This would support the overcoming of oversimplified images and estimations about depression in current society and further, help to recognize chronic pain properly on the larger scale of assessments that address society as a whole. (shrink)

This article argues that cruelty, as a willingness to see or orchestrate the suffering of others, is not an unfortunate side-effect of neoliberal theories put into practice but is constitutive of the neoliberal project from its theoretical inception. Drawing on Lisa Duggan’s concept of ‘optimistic cruelty’ and treating the canonical texts of neoliberal economic theory as literary artefacts, the article develops this argument through a close reading of one of the central architects of the neoliberal project, the philosopher and economist (...) Friedrich Hayek. The first part of the article examines how Hayek attempts to justify the brutality of the market order he imagines – the catallaxy – by arguing that this brutality is the natural consequence of the spontaneous evolutionary processes that move civilisation forward. The second part brings to the fore the eugenicist undertones that suffuse this vision, despite Hayek’s apparent rejection of Social Darwinism. I analyse how Hayek’s market order operates through a series of disciplinary and biopolitical technologies that use pain, frustration, punishment and stigmatisation to eliminate bad habits, practices and subjectivities. These cruel mechanisms enable the catallaxy to sort between productive and unproductive lives to ensure that available resources are directed towards the former – even if it means that the others might be left to die. As such, cruelty is an affective atmosphere that permeates the catallaxy. (shrink)

This article employs a thumbs and thumbnails analysis to analyze the 85 most viewed Asian online porn thumbnails, videos, and their audiences’ comments to argue that cyberspace functions as a space of “affective simulation,” rather than simply as a space of representation. For these online viewers, the performativity of pain by Asian women porn stars functions as an entry point to access and externalize their affective excess.

The plan of this book -- The problem of animal pain -- The Bayesian argument from animal pain -- Is there really a problem? the challenge of neo-cartesianism -- There is a problem. the defeat of neo-cartesianism -- The saint-making theodicy I:Negative phase -- The saint-making theodicy II:Positive phase -- Animal saints -- Animal afterlife.

We usually think about language and pain as opposites, the one being about expression and connection, the other destructive, "beyond words" so to speak, and isolating. Language Pangs challenges these familiar conceptions and offers a radical reconsideration of the relationship between pain and language in terms of an essential interconnectedness. Ilit Ferber's premise is that we cannot probe the experience of pain without taking account its inherent relation to language; and vice versa, that our understanding of the nature of language (...) essentially depends on how we take account of its correspondence with pain. Language Pangs brings together discussions of philosophical as well as literary texts, an intersection that is especially productive in considering the phenomenology of pain and its bearing on language. Ferber explores a phenomenology of pain and its relation to language, before providing a unique close reading of Johann Gottfried Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language, the first modern philosophical text to consider language and pain, establishing the cry of pain as the origin of language. Herder also raises important claims regarding the relationship between human and animal, questions of sympathy and the role of hearing in the expression of pain. Beyond Herder, the book grapples with the work of other profound thinkers, including Martin Heidegger, Stanley Cavell, and André Gide, and finally, Sophocles, from them weaving new insights on the experience of pain, expression, sympathy, and hearing. (shrink)

Memory can play two quite different roles in grief. Memories involving a deceased loved one can make them feel either enjoyably present, or especially and painfully absent. In this paper, we consider what makes it possible for memory to play these two different roles, both in grief and more generally. We answer this question by appeal to the phenomenological nature of vivid remembering, and the context in which such memories occur. We argue that different contexts can make salient different aspects (...) of memory's phenomenological nature, thus making what is remembered sometimes feel pleasantly 'present' again, and sometimes painfully absent. (shrink)

Feelings associated with grief are regularly described as painful, but in what respect are they to be understood as pain? The acute pain of easily located tissue damage has long been the paradigm of pain in scientific and philosophical analysis, a dominance serving to obscure features the pain of grief might share not only with chronic pain but with some depressive suffering. Two examples of such commonalities are explored (ways pain feelings are experienced as in and of the body; and (...) are often recessed to the background of consciousness). These features are introduced to illustrate how a preliminary search for additional pain paradigms might proceed, and in so doing to offer some support for the proposal that pain endured as part of grieving may be real pain, not merely 'pain'. (shrink)

With an increasing number of individuals living with chronic illness and pain, integrative approaches offering self-management support are needed. This book proposes a multi-layered framework integrating the body/self/environment that cultivates wholeness as an authentic embodied presence in alignment with a reflexive self.

The evolutionary process involved the suffering of quadrillions of sentient beings over millions of years. I argue that when we take this into account, then it is likely that when the first humans appeared, the world was already at an enormous axiological deficit, and that even on favorable assumptions about humanity, it is doubtful that we have overturned this deficit or ever will. Even if there’s no such deficit or we can overturn it, it remains the case that everything of (...) value associated with humanity was made possible by our evolutionary history and all that animal suffering. It can seem indecent to regard all that past suffering as having been worth it simply because it was a causal precondition for our existence. But when we consider the realistic alternatives to the way evolution in fact unfolded, there is nevertheless a conditional case for regarding past sentient suffering as a kind of necessary evil. (shrink)

This groundbreaking interactive book contains the tools that you will need in order to clean your emotional house from top to bottom. It includes a journal as well as access to audio meditations for you to listen along to as you read. The meditations will help you dig deep into past trauma and discover when and how trauma took root, learn to get in touch with various parts of the physical and energy body, and how to use them to let (...) go of stored traumas. From this, you will learn to live from a new mindful and powerful space. (shrink)

By definition, pain is a sensory and emotional experience that is felt in a particular part of the body. The precise relationship between somatic events at the site where pain is experienced, and central processing giving rise to the mental experience of pain remains the subject of debate, but there is little disagreement in scholarly circles that both aspects of pain are critical to its experience. Recent experimental work, however, suggests a public view that is at odds with this conceptualisation. (...) By demonstrating that the public does not necessarily endorse central tenets of the “mental” view of pain (subjectivity, privacy, and incorrigibility), experimental philosophers have argued that the public holds a more “body-centric” view than most clinicians and scholars. Such a discrepancy would have important implications for how the public interacts with pain science and clinical care. In response, we tested the hypothesis that the public is capable of a more “mind-centric” view of pain. Using a series of vignettes, we demonstrate that in situations which highlight mental aspects of pain the public can, and does, recognize pain as a mental phenomenon. We also demonstrate that the public view is subject to context effects, by showing that the public’s view is modified when situations emphasizing mental and somatic aspects of pain are presented together. (shrink)

While some philosophers believe disabilities constitute a “bad-difference,” others think they constitute a “mere-difference” (Barnes 2016). On this latter view, while disabilities may create certain hardships, having a disability is not bad in itself. I argue that chronic pain problematizes this disability-neutral view. In doing so, I first survey the literature on chronic pain (§1). Then, I argue that Barnes’s mere-difference view cannot adequately accommodate the lived experiences of many people who suffer from chronic pain (§2). Next, I consider two (...) ways Barnes might respond and I explain why these responses are not workable (§3). Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of disability variantism, the view that just as some disabilities can be neutral or even positive for some individuals, other disabilities like chronic pain can understandably make some people’s lives miserable not because society has failed them but simply because some conditions can openly conflict with well-being (§4). (shrink)

A chronic progressive brain disease characterized by degeneration of dopaminergic neurons of the substantia nigra is Parkinson's disease. In addition to classical motor disorders, Parkinson's disease is characterized by a wide range of non-motor manifestations, which include vegetative, sensory, mental, affective disorders, sleep and wakefulness disorders. The most common non-motor symptoms of the disease, such as pain syndromes, cause severe discomfort and a significant decrease in the quality of life of patients, but they are poorly understood, although they are an (...) important symptom of Parkinson's disease. (shrink)

The purpose of this research was to look at a fairly common occurrence of back discomfort or backache during pregnancy, especially in the early stages. The ligaments in your body stretch and grow softer throughout pregnancy to prepare you for labor. This can place a pressure on your pelvic and lower back joints, causing back discomfort. The purpose of this study was to determine what factors influence and in pregnant women, as well as to assess the prevalence and severity of (...) and during the pregnancy. (shrink)

This paper aims to know the direct role of morphine in postpartum pain relief of Iraqi Women A systematic study was established consisting of two groups of patients and control, where patients were collected from different hospitals in Iraq. The group of patients consisted of 30 patients, while as for the control group it was 15 patients Patients were assessed based on the amount of oral pain relievers required, and a visual analog scale sensitive enough to measure pain was used (...) and the VAS data correlates well with other methods of measuring pain intensity.Role morphine to decrease complication Nausea according to VAS, where we notice a decrease in symptoms and a noticeable improvement by 40%, and the same is the case in relieving headache pain, but the percentage of improvement increased and became 60%, but this does not mean we can take morphine at any time and in final we concluded in this study that morphine helps to reduce the intake of pain relievers that are taken orally. (shrink)

This article describes the pathology of facial pain, as well as a comparative study of domestic and European scientists. Important points in the development of facial pain, a number of authors consider chronic inflammatory changes in the peripheral branches of the trigeminal nerve and development as a result of inflammatory processes in the paranasal sinuses. Against the background of inflammation of the mucous membrane of the sinuses, the nature of the pain syndrome is determined by a complex system of sensitive (...) innervation of the paranasal sinuses: both peripheral receptors and fibers of the trigeminal nerve in the nasal mucosa, and receptors and fibers of the trigeminal nerve in the walls of the vessels supplying these sinuses, as well as sensitive fibers of the dura and pia mater. (shrink)

Sengupta, P.. Re-Orienting Design: An Unbearable Pain [Invited talk]. In: International Conference of the Learning Sciences, Special Session on Learning and Identity.

The paper offers a theory of cruelty that includes the following claims: First, cruelty is best understood as a disposition to take delight in the very infliction of suffering on others. Thus understood, cruelty is the same phenomenon as that studied and operationalized by psychologists in the last decade or so under the heading of everyday sadism. Second, for people to be cruel, they need not have proper understanding of the moral standing of their victims. Third, ascriptions of cruelty do (...) not depend on judgments regarding the moral wrongness of the assumed cruel act. Fourth, since cruelty is primarily a property of agents rather than of actions, and since actions are not always a reliable indication of cruelty, identifying cruelty is a more challenging task than usually thought. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 4, Page 765-781, August 2022.

Not only trauma, mourning and disease, but also disability has been recognised in the Book of Job in which the body plays an exceptional role. The protagonist is suffering physically, psychically and spiritually. Although the word, •–• [be sick, ill], never occurs in the book, his body is portrayed negatively being afflicted by some unknown illness, which would probably exclude him from the community described in Leviticus 13-14. While •’—’—“ [be silent] occurs several times in the book, it never has (...) the alternative meaning of deaf. Yet, his explicit empathy and sacrificial charity –’–’•’’— [for the blind] and –’–’’–’’•’ [for the lame] in 29:15 resonate with his own plight and undermine the possible discriminatory restrictions of like disabled in Leviticus 21:18. In this way, the Book of Job has a transgressive and yet liberating subtext, subverting the idealised body of his status quo. This subtle and veiled critique by the protagonist and therefore the book can be interpreted from a psychoanalytic perspective on physical disability and illness, where the symptoms and alleged imperfections of the body quietly cry out against social and cultural injustice of which they are the projections and mirrors when the context has silenced a concern for the body because of a lack of compassion as it is in the situation of Job. CONTRIBUTION: The intersection and cross-fertilisation of Biblical Studies, Disability Studies and psychoanalytic theory as interdisciplinary approach widens the horizons and deepens the insight of all three research fields, hopefully for the benefit of those who suffer from their bodies, their psyches and their societies. (shrink)

This chapter’s focus on pain highlights a problem of general concern. Following Zurn, it is presumed that curiosity is subject to socio-cultural and political constraints. And, to restate, mindful of these constraints, critical thinking can be blocked or discouraged by nurse educators when this disposition and activity menaces professional values and practices associated with those values.

Geniušas, S., 2021. Kas yra skausmas? Vilnius: Phi knygos, 150 p. ISBN 978-609-8236-12-5.

We agree with Smrdu that pain cannot be reduced to a neurophysiological event and we welcome a (micro-)phenomenological investigation of pain experience. However, we do not think such an investigation can provide sufficient support for either a 5E theory of pain, or (just) an enactive one. A 5E theory of pain would require a clarification of how the 5Es fit together. An enactive account would require a “circulation” between first- and third-person data.

When I say ‘pain’, it is clearly a singular phenomenon. Yet if I ask for an example, you can provide many varying instances that confound the idea of its singularity. How can a pinprick be of the same thing as depression or grief? This study maintains the singularity of pain by exploring the process and structure of its experience to account for its variance and its subjectivity. Heidegger’s Being and Time provides the pathway to achieving this, where we comprehend how (...) pain’s myriad manifestations, and their inherent subjectivity, relate to our way of Being – the meaningful horizon through which we encounter pain. The study comes to tie the process of encountering pain with a structure that suffering provides, which explains both the variance and the subjectivity of the pain experience. This can then be mapped onto individual experiences of a singular phenomenon to understand how they arose and what has conditioned them. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Calum Miller skillfully and creatively argues for the counterintuitive view that there aren’t any good reasons to believe that non-human animals feel pain in a morally relevant sense. By Miller’s lights, such reasons are either weak in their own right or they also favor the view that non-human animals don’t feel morally relevant pain. In this paper, I explain why Miller’s view is mistaken. In particular, I sketch a very reasonable abductive argument for (...) the conclusion that non-human animals feel morally relevant pain. This argument shows that, even in the face of Miller’s moderate skepticism about whether non-human animals feel pain in a morally relevant sense, it’s still more epistemically reasonable to believe that non-human animals feel pain in a morally relevant sense than not. In which case, I conclude that Miller has failed to show that there aren’t any good reasons to believe that non-human animals don’t feel pain in a morally relevant sense that don’t also count in favor of the view that non-human animals don’t feel morally relevant pain. (shrink)