SH7 Philosophy of Pain and Pleasure
Many experiences feel bad or good, unpleasant or pleasant. Pain often feels bad. Tasting chocolate is often pleasant. Our course concerns this “affective” dimension of experience—experience’s “valence”, as it’s also put—focusing particularly but not exclusively on pain and unpleasantness. A topic of increasing philosophical and scientific interest, affect raises numerous questions across disparate areas of philosophy and beyond, including philosophy of mind and psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, and value theory. Questions include: What is the nature of unpleasantness and pleasantness? What is the relationship between pain and perception? In what senses is it really bad or good to be in states that feel bad or feel good? Is the folk concept of pain coherent? Does the concept of pain pick out a scientific kind?
Course lecturer: Dr David Bain & Dr Jennifer Corns
Semester: 1
Lecture hour & venue: see Honours timetable
Teaching resources for this course will be made available on the Philosophy Moodle site.
Preliminary Reading:
For introductions to the topics:
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entires on Pain (Aydede) and Pleasure (Katz).
- Any chapters of initial interest from Part 1 of the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Pain (soon to be in UG library).
For a sense of the instructors’ work on the topic:
- Dr. Bain (2012) "What Makes Pains Unpleasant?"
- Dr. Corns (2014) "The Inadequacy of Unitary Characterizations of Pain"
To further whet your appetite:
- "Why you can't make a computer that feels pain" (Dennett, 1978)
- Chapter 1 of The Challenge of Pain (Melzack and Wall, 1988, 2nd ed.)
- "Pleasure systems in the brain" (Berridge and Kringlebach, 2015)
By the end of the course, students shouldbe able to:
- formulate clearly, and explain, the key philosophical theories of affect and of affective experiences such as pain and pleasure
- assess the strengths and weaknesses of the key philosophical approaches to affect and to affective experiences such as pain and pleasure
- critically assess debates about the relationship between (on the one hand) affect and affective experiences, and (on the other) representational content, perception, evaluation, desire, motivation, and action;
- describe certain anomalous cases (such as phantom limb cases, pain insensitivity, pain asymbolia, masochism, and anhedonia) and explain their theoretical significance.