Recent Work on Pain

Abstract

Pain is a ubiquitous feature of everyday life, so it is unsurprising to find a rich corpus of everyday wisdom about it. Pains, we believe, are felt in certain parts of the body and, typically, something is wrong with that felt place. Pains are unpleasant and come in different degrees of intensity. Other things being equal, we act to alleviate our pains and, other things being equal, it is wrong to cause them. We take these and many more claims about pain for granted in our everyday interactions. It may, then, be surprising to find puzzlement and disagreement about the nature of pain across the disciplines. But this indeed is what we find. For the scientist – from the biologist, to the psychologist, to the neuroscientist – while much has been learned, controversy remains: any purported pain system, process, mechanism, area or activation pattern is controversial. Accordingly, for the clinician, pain remains a problematic disease entity that is only validly identified through subjective report. While the controversial questions concerning pain’s nature are of interest to the philosopher in their own right, progress further promises to contribute to the many related theoretical and practical inquiries to which they are relevant.