The Complex Reality of Pain

This book employs contemporary philosophy, scientific research, and clinical reports to argue that pain, though real, is not an appropriate object of scientific generalisations or medical intervention. Each pain experience is complex and idiosyncractic in a way which undermines scientific utility.

Autorentext

Jennifer Corns is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her research focuses on pain, affect, suffering, and death. She is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain (Routledge, 2017), and co-editor of Philosophy of Pain: Unpleasantness, Emotion, and Deviance (Routledge, 2018) and Philosophy of Suffering: Metaphysics, Value, and Normativity (Routledge, forthcoming).

Inhalt

1. Introduction: Pain in Life, Science, and Medicine

2. The Need for Complexity: Rejecting the Orthodoxy of Simplicity

3. Mechanistic Explanations: How Complex Idiosyncrasy Undermines Them

4. Adopting Scientific Eliminativism: How Complex Idiosyncrasy Undermines Scientific Utility

5. Rejecting Traditional Elimniativism: Why Pain is Still Real

6. Conclusion: Living with the Complex Reality of Pain