Online research in philosophy

Austin’s destructive contextualist criticism of the theory of knowledge, as grounded on foundationalism, is presented. It is claimed that incorrigibility is not a secondary issue for the foundationalist conception of knowledge and justification, even if the hallmark of foundationalism is not to be sought in the so-called ‘quest for certainty’, but rather in the idea of epistemological realism.

Review of Murat Aydede's edited collection, *Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study".

The ordinary conception of pain has two major threads that are in tension with each other. It is this tension that generates various puzzles in our philosophical understanding of pain. According to one thread, pain is something that we locate in body parts using sentences such as..

The aim of this paper is to show that the empirical and conceptual constraints arising from the scientific research on pain phenomena should be taken into account in philosophical discussions concerning the nature and function of pain; otherwise, there is a good chance that philosophers will advocate too simplistic, confused or even outrightly mistaken theories or conceptions of pain. In order to prove this point, one of the most influential philosophical theories of pain—the so-called perceptual view of pain—is put to scrutiny in the light of the psychological, clinical and neurophysiological data coming from the field of pain research. More specifically, these data are presented in such a way as to show that the sensory quality or sensory aspect of pain is, contrary to the objectivistic claims of the perceptual view of pain, a necessary component of our total pain experience.

In Why pains are not mental objects (1998) Guy Douglasrightly argues that pains are modes rather than objects ofperceptions or sensations. In this paper I try to go a stepfurther and argue that there are circumstances when pains canbecome objects even while they remain modes of experience.By analysing cases of extreme pain as presented by Scarry,Sartre, Wiesel, Grahek and Wall, I attempt to show thatintense physical pain may evolve into a force that, likeimagination, can make our most intense state of experiencebecome a mental object. I shall finally argue that, thoughextreme pains cannot serve as paradigm cases, they do showthe general importance of taking pain states to be objects.