CUNY Graduate Center
Center for Global Ethics & Politics
PhD
Glasgow, Glasgow City, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
PhilPapers Editorships
Pain
  •  14
    Promiscuous Kinds and Individual Minds
    Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 4. 2023.
    Promiscuous realism is the thesis that there are many equally legitimate ways of classifying the world’s entities. Advocates of promiscuous realism are typically taken to hold the further the- sis, often undistinguished, that kind terms usefully deployed in scientific generalisations are no more natural than those deployed for any other purposes. Call this further thesis promiscuous nat- uralism. I here defend a version of promiscuous realism which denies promiscuous naturalism. To do so, I intr…Read more
  •  159
    Philosophy of Pain (edited book)
    Routledge. 2018.
    A collection, edited by David Bain, Michael Brady, and Jennifer Corns, originating in our Pain Project. Table of Contents: Colin Klein and Manolo Martínez – ‘Imperativism and Pain Intensity’; Murat Aydede and Matthew Fulkerson – ‘Pain and Theories of Sensory Affect’; Dan-Mikael Ellingson, Morten Kringlebach, and Siri Leknes – ‘A Neuroscience Perspective on Pleasure and Pain’; Michael Brady – ‘The Rationality of Emotional and Physical Suffering’; Jennifer Corns – ‘The Placebo Effect’; Jesse Pri…Read more
  •  4
    Grief Worlds is a phenomenological exploration of grief experiences and what they may teach us about emotional experience and human experience more generally. Though explicitly and self-consciously...
  •  16
    A Critical Engagement with Ratcliffe’s Phenomenological Exploration of Grief
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (1): 85-93. 2023.
    Grief Worlds is a phenomenological exploration of grief experiences and what they may teach us about emotional experience and human experience more generally. Though explicitly and self-consciously...
  •  98
    Suffering as significantly disrupted agency
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (3): 706-729. 2021.
    This article offers a new theory of suffering as significantly disrupted agency. In presenting it, I here make three significant contributions. First, I subject the leading account of suffering as undesired unpleasant experience (Brady, 2018) to its first dose of sustained scrutiny. Second and drawing on this discussion, I identify and liberate eight desiderata for any account of suffering. Third, I present the novel account of suffering as significantly disrupted agency and argue that it satisf…Read more
  •  23
    The Complex Reality of Pain
    Routledge. 2020.
    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 an appropriate target for medical intervention. Each pain experience is instead complex and idiosyncratic in a way which undermines scientific utility. In addition to contributing novel arguments and developing a novel position on the nature of pain, the book provides an interdisciplinary overview of dominant models of…Read more
  •  28
    Lessons for ethics from the science of pain
    In Geoffrey S. Holtzman & Elisabeth Hildt (eds.), Does Neuroscience Have Normative Implications?, . pp. 39-57. 2020.
    Pain is ubiquitous. It is also surprisingly complex. In this chapter, we first provide a truncated overview of the neuroscience of pain. This overview reveals four surprising empirical discoveries about the nature of pain with relevance for ethics. In particular, we discuss the ways in which these discoveries both inform putative normative ethical principles concerning pain and illuminate metaethical debates concerning a realist, naturalist moral metaphysics, moral epistemology, and moral motiva…Read more
  •  84
    Recent Work on Pain
    Analysis 80 (1): 202-202. 2020.
    Analysis, 78: 737–53. doi:_ 10.1093/analys/any055 _
  •  94
    Moral motivation and the affective appeal
    Philosophical Studies 178 (1): 71-94. 2021.
    Proponents of “the affective appeal” :787–812, 2014; Zagzebski in Philos Phenomenol Res 66:104–124, 2003) argue that we can make progress in the longstanding debate about the nature of moral motivation by appealing to the affective dimension of affective episodes such as emotions, which allegedly play either a causal or constitutive role in moral judgements. Specifically, they claim that appealing to affect vindicates a version of Motivational Internalism—roughly, the view that there is a necess…Read more
  •  183
    A collection, edited by David Bain, Michael Brady, and Jennifer Corns, originating in our Value of Suffering Project. Table of Contents: Michael Wheeler - ‘How should affective phenomena be studied?’; Julien Deonna & Fabrice Teroni – ‘Pleasures, unpleasures, and emotions’; Hilla Jacobson – ‘The attitudinal representational theory of painfulness fleshed out’; Tim Schroeder – ‘What we represent when we represent the badness of getting hurt’; Hagit Benbaji – ‘A defence of the inner view of pain’;…Read more
  •  34
    Corrigendum
    Analysis. forthcoming.
    Recent Work on Pain, Analysis, doi:_ 10.1093/analys/any055 _
  •  39
    Rethinking the Negativity Bias
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (3): 607-625. 2018.
    The negativity bias is a broad psychological principle according to which the negative is more causally efficacious than the positive. Bad, as it is often put, is stronger than good. The principle is widely accepted and often serves as a constraint in affective science. If true, it has significant implications for everyday life and philosophical inquiry. In this article, I submit the negativity bias to its first dose of philosophical scrutiny and argue that it should be rejected. I conclude by o…Read more
  • Sensory Substitution and Augmentation
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
  •  188
    Recent Work on Pain
    Analysis 78 (4): 737-753. 2018.
  •  1
    The Placebo Effect
    In David Bain, Michael Brady & Jennifer Corns (eds.), Philosophy of Pain, Routledge. 2018.
    Despite the conceptual problems in identifying the placebo effect, an increasing number of multidisciplinary inquiries rest on the assumption that there is a distinct class of effects, placebo effects. In this chapter, I argue against this assumption. I present cases and characterizations of the placebo effect as offered in the literature, and argue that the latter are subject to insurmountable problems. Moreover, I argue that identification of placebo effects as such is not useful for the three…Read more
  •  1304
    The Philosophy of Pain - Introduction
    In David Bain, Michael Brady & Jennifer Corns (eds.), Philosophy of Pain, Routledge. 2018.
    Over recent decades, pain has received increasing attention as – with ever greater sophistication and rigour – theorists have tried to answer the deep and difficult questions it poses. What is pain’s nature? What is its point? In what sense is it bad? The papers collected in this volume are a contribution to that effort ...
  •  299
    This is an excerpt from a report on the workshop on mind and attention in Indian philosophy at Harvard University, on September 21st and 22nd, 2013, written by Kevin Connolly, Jennifer Corns, Nilanjan Das, Zachary Irving, and Lu Teng, and available at http://networksensoryresearch.utoronto.ca/Events_%26_Discussion.html This portion of the report explores the question: Can meditation give us moral knowledge?
  •  75
    The Social Pain Posit
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (3): 561-582. 2015.
    Although discussion of social pain has become popular among researchers in psychology and behavioural neuroscience, the philosophical community has yet to pay it any direct attention. Social pain is characterized as the emotional reaction to the perception of the loss or devaluation of desired relationships. These are argued to comprise a pain type and are explicitly intended to include the everyday sub-types grief, jealousy, heartbreak, rejection, and hurt feelings. Social pain is accordingly p…Read more
  •  159
    Traditional eliminativism is the view that a term should be eliminated from everyday speech due to failures of reference. Following Edouard Machery, we may distinguish this traditional eliminativism about a kind and its term from a scientific eliminativism according to which a term should be eliminated from scientific discourse due to a lack of referential utility. The distinction matters if any terms are rightly retained for daily life despite being rightly eliminated from scientific inquiry. I…Read more
  •  114
    Unpleasantness, Motivational Oomph, and Painfulness
    Mind and Language 29 (2): 238-254. 2014.
    Painful pains are, paradigmatically, unpleasant and motivating. The dominant view amongst philosophers and pain scientists is that these two features are essentially related and sufficient for painfulness. In this article, I first offer scientifically informed characterizations of both unpleasantness and motivational oomph and argue against other extant accounts. I then draw on folk-characterized cases and current neurobiological and neurobehavioral evidence to argue that both dominant positions…Read more
  •  166
    The inadequacy of unitary characterizations of pain
    Philosophical Studies 169 (3): 355-378. 2014.
    Though pain scientists now understand pain to be a complex experience typically composed of sensation, emotion, cognition, and motivational responses, many philosophers maintain that pain is adequately characterized by one privileged aspect of this complexity. Philosophically dominant unitary accounts of pain as a sensation or perception are here evaluated by their ability to explain actual cases—and found wanting. Further, it is argued that no forthcoming unitary characterization of pain is lik…Read more
  •  17
    When is a reason properly pragmatic?
    Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2): 613-614. 2012.
  •  33
    The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain (edited book)
    Routledge. 2017.
    The phenomenon of pain presents problems and puzzles for philosophers who want to understand its nature. Though pain might seem simple, there has been disagreement since Aristotle about whether pain is an emotion, sensation, perception, or disturbed state of the body. Despite advances in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine, pain is still poorly understood and multiple theories of pain abound. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, pr…Read more