• Senior Lecturer (Philosophy)

telephone: 01413308768
email: David.Bain@glasgow.ac.uk

Interested in consciousness and perception, particularly somatosensory awareness, I am currently Principal Investigator (with Michael Brady) of an interdisciplinary research project, The Nature of Pain: Hedonic Tone, Motivation, and Non-Human Animals, investigating (i) relations between pain, perception, and emotion, and (ii) pain in non-human animals.  Our team comprises philosophers, neuroscientists, veterinary scientists, and a postdoctoral fellow, spread amongst Glasgow, Paris, New York, and Oslo.  This Templeton-funded project involves three workshops, a major international conference, and a collection edited by the PIs.

My current work focuses on what I call pain’s “hedomotive character”: its unpleasantness, in virtue of which pain is bad, sometimes awful; and its motivational force, in virtue of which pain can be good, indeed life-saving. I am interested in the nature of these features and the relations between them.  Hedonic tone -- pleasure as well as pain -- and its normative and motivational significance interest me in other cases too, e.g. smell, taste, touch, and our emotional lives.

Other interests include perceptual 'revelation'; externalist psychosemantics for experience and thought; recognitional capacities; relations between the primary/secondary quality distinction and differences in how we experience such diverse features as colours, shapes, temperatures, and natural kinds; and, recently, the very ideas of perceptual content and phenomenal character.

For more, see my personal webpage.

I am currently Principal Investigator (with Michael Brady) of an interdisciplinary research project, The Nature of Pain: Hedonic Tone, Motivation, and Non-Human Animals, investigating:

(i) relations between pain, perception, and emotion, and

(ii) pain in non-human animals.

Our team comprises philosophers, neuroscientists, veterinary scientists, and a postdoctoral fellow, spread amongst Glasgow, Paris, New York, and Oslo.

The project, supported by a £107,000 Templeton grant, involves three workshops, a major international conference, and a collection edited by the PIs.  It runs until 30 June 2013.

For more, see www.davidbain.org/research

I am very happy to receive proposals from students considering a PhD in philosophy of mind.

For more, see www.davidbain.org/teaching/phd-inquiries.

I am currently either first or second supervisor for the following doctoral students:

• Stuart Crutchfield.  The Phenomenal Unity of Perceptual Experience

• John Donaldson.  Mental Causation

• Andy MacGregor.  A Relational Theory of Perception

• Graham Peebles.  The Belief Theory of Perception

In addition to supervision, at doctoral, masters, and undergraduate level, I usually teach on the following courses:

• MLitt 2.  Philosophy of Mind

• MLitt 2.  Philosophy of Language

• Senior Honours.  SH11. Externalism and Reference

• Junior Honours.  JH7.  Philosophy of Mind

• Junior Honours.  JH2.  Philosophy of Language (tutorials only)

• Level 2.  2K.  Knowledge, Meaning, and Inference (tutorials only)

• Level 1.  1K.  Knowledge and the World

For more information, see www.davidbain.org/teaching

A member of Glasgow's philosophy department, I taught previously at Oxford, Bristol, and Nottingham universities, after taking my BA and DPhil at Oxford, either side of an MA at Chapel Hill.  Interested in all aspects of philosophy, my research is mainly in philosophy of mind.

For more, please see my personal webpage.