Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, second edition

Front Cover
MIT Press, Dec 16, 2011 - Psychology - 198 pages
An examination of the two most radical dissociation syndromes of the human pain experience—pain without painfulness and painfulness without pain—and what they reveal about the complex nature of pain and its sensory, cognitive, and behavioral components.

In Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, Nikola Grahek examines two of the most radical dissociation syndromes to be found in human pain experience: pain without painfulness and painfulness without pain. Grahek shows that these two syndromes—the complete dissociation of the sensory dimension of pain from its affective, cognitive, and behavioral components, and its opposite, the dissociation of pain's affective components from its sensory-discriminative components (inconceivable to most of us but documented by ample clinical evidence)—have much to teach us about the true nature and structure of human pain experience.

Grahek explains the crucial distinction between feeling pain and being in pain, defending it on both conceptual and empirical grounds. He argues that the two dissociative syndromes reveal the complexity of the human pain experience: its major components, the role they play in overall pain experience, the way they work together, and the basic neural structures and mechanisms that subserve them.

Feeling Pain and Being in Pain does not offer another philosophical theory of pain that conclusively supports or definitively refutes either subjectivist or objectivist assumptions in the philosophy of mind. Instead, Grahek calls for a less doctrinaire and more balanced approach to the study of mind–brain phenomena.

 

Contents

1 Introduction
1
2 The Biological Function and Importance of Pain
7
3 Dissociation Phenomena in Human Pain Experience
29
4 Pain Asymbolia
41
5 How Is Pain without Painfulness Possible?
51
6 Conceptual and Theoretical Implications of Pain Asymbolia
73
7 Pain Quality and Painfulness without Pain
95
8 CFibers and All That
141
References
167
Index
175
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About the author (2011)

The late Nikola Grahek was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade. From 1994 to 1995, he was Research Assistant to Daniel Dennett at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor Codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness; Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (all published by the MIT Press), From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Mind, and other books.

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