Product Description

This work is 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" - originally published in Germany, then revised for a wider audience at the urging of Daniel Dennett - 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #476669 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 168 pages

Review
"Nikola Grahek had both the conceptual acuity of a well-trained philosopher and an intimate, broad-based knowledge of the empirical science relating to his chosen topic, pain. Putting the two together, he came up with some startling and attention-shifting proposals about how to make sense of pain, revisionary proposals that should clarify the thinking of scientist and layman alike." - from the foreword by Daniel Dennett"

About the Author
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.