Pains are unpleasant, universally unpleasant. What seems trivially true has been rejected by various pain scientists because of several phenomena which allegedly show that there can be pain which is not unpleasant. This rejection is partly based on the ambiguity of ‘pain unpleasantness’ which can be avoided by distinguishing between primary and secondary pain affect. As for the alleged counterexamples to the above, I will argue that experiences of episodic analgesia as well as the ‘pain’ experiences of some lobotomized and (...) morphine patients should not be construed as cases in which pain and unpleasantness come apart, but rather as cases in which nociceptive activity and pain dissociate. Regarding the notorious case of pain asymbolia, I will demonstrate that the behaviour of patients with this syndrome suggests that they do feel pain, and that their pain sensations are unpleasant, but much less unpleasant than the pains normal people would have if exposed to the same noxious stimuli. Adopting such an account of these phenomena allows us to retain the widely accepted IASP definition of pain, and thus avoids the issue of integrating non-unpleasant pains into a plausible definition of pain. (shrink)

I argue that pain sensations are perceptual states, namely states that represent (actual or potential) damage. I defend this position against the objection that pains, unlike standard perceptual states, do not allow for an appearance-reality distinction by arguing that in the case of pain as well as in standard perceptual experiences, cognitive penetration or malfunctions of the underlying sensory systems can lead to a dissociation between the sensation on the one hand, and what is represented on the other hand. Moreover, (...) I refute the objection that the allegedly weak correlation between pain and bodily damage forces intentionalist accounts of pain to postulate so many malfunctions (misrepresentations respectively) that such accounts become implausible. I also rebut Murat Aydede’s objection that our linguistic practice supposedly shows that there is a conceptual difference between standard perceptual experiences and pain sensations by challenging Aydede’s premise that we always withdraw standard perceptual reports in case of counterevidence, while we never do that with pain reports. At the end, I propose an explanation as to why we do not express perceptual reports of (potential) bodily damage in objectivist, but in mental terms. (shrink)

In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard writes that Abraham intended to sacrifice Isaac for God’s sake as well as for his own sake. Drawing mainly on The Sickness unto Death I will argue that Kierkegaard construes Abraham as becoming a true self, that is, as someone who becomes self-transparent before God. What this means and how our relationship with God is supposed to be involved in the process of becoming a self is the focus of my paper. While various articles have (...) been written on that topic, my aim here is to give the most charitable interpretation of Kierkegaard’s theses and the theological concepts involved. (shrink)

Nanay (2017) argues for unconscious mental imagery, inter alia based on the assumption that successful performance in imagery tasks requires the manipulation of mental imagery. I challenge this assumption with the help of results presented in Shepard and Metzler (1971), Zeman et al. (2010), and Keogh and Pearson (2018). The studies suggest that imagery tasks can be successfully performed by means of cognitive/propositional strategies which do not rely on imagery.

In this paper I introduce John D. Caputo’s view of the divine and argue against his claim that we can preserve faith in God while dropping the idea of divine revelation. Despite Caputo’s apophatic point of view, he makes two claims with regard to God, or ’the divine’. First, he claims that we all have a divine call for justice and compassion in us. Secondly, he claims that God’s kingdom comes true if we make it happen and that this is (...) something we can hope for. In the first half of this paper I will argue that Caputo does not have to reject the idea of revelation if we understand revelation as involving an interpretation of the experiences with the divine. In the second half, I will claim that Caputo even has to allow for divine revelation if he wants to stick to his positive statements about God. We can only know that a desire is divine if we have criteria to distinguish the divine from the profane or the diabolic. Based on Richard Kearney and John Hick I argue that particular traditions offer such criteria and that they ultimately depend on what is taken to be God’s will. Likewise, to hope that the kingdom of God comes and to act in a way that realizes it presupposes that the agent believes this to be the way God wants him to live—and God’s will must have somehow been disclosed. (shrink)

Drawing on a broad range of case studies, the contributors to Terrestrial Transformations explore the political and economic forces entangled in environmental and ecological problems and look at humanity's future in light of climate change and existing environmental problems.

Various scholars have suggested that the main function of Korean shamanic rituals is the change of the participants’ feelings. I elaborate what these scholars potentially mean by “function”, challenge what I take to be their core claim, and argue that at least in the case of Korean shamanic healing rituals their sponsorship has rather to be explained based on the clients’ ostensible motivational and belief-states. Korean clients sponsor such rituals because they want their beloved ones to be healed and because (...) they believe that the shamanic ritual can potentially accomplish such healing. I underpin this thesis by two representative actual Korean shamanic healing rituals. (shrink)