Nikos Psarros

In this paper a concept of pain is introduced that regards pain as a formal entity that can be realized in various material ways, similarly to the concept of justice. Pain utterances have rather the character of evaluative judgments and not of propositional descriptions. They aren’t therefore true or false, but adequate or inadequate, correct or wrong, according to the circumstances and the context, in which they are made. Because pain is constituted by the interplay of individual and public attitudes also inside a given cultural context we are always capable of extending our concept of pain by integrating other cultural attitudes towards pain and also capable of giving arguments that shall convince the members of an other culture to accept our ideas about pain

The paper asks about the reasons for the neglect of chemistry in modern philosophy of science and investigates in how far this science can be the object of an autonomous philosophical reflection. It is argued that from a culturalistic point of view chemistry indeed offers a field of interesting questions ranging from the reconstruction of its epistemological objects to the elucidation of the semantic functions of terms like "atom" or "molecule". It is further argued that the philosophical reflection upon chemistry has important consequences for the didactic, the history and even the ethics of this science, making thus philosophy to a partner of chemistry in fulfilling its purposes in human society.