Several authors have recently argued that the content of pains (and bodily sensations more generally) is imperative rather than descriptive. I show that such an account can help resolve competing intuitions about phantom limb pain. As imperatives, phantom pains are neither true nor false. However, phantom limb pains presuppose falsehoods, in the same way that any imperative which demands something impossible presupposes a falsehood. Phantom pains, like many chronic pains, are thus commands that cannot be (...) satisfied. I conclude by showing that some of the negative psychological consequences of chronic pain are a direct consequence of their imperative nature. (shrink)

This article explores the phenomenon of “phantom pain.” The analysis is based on personal experiences elicited from individuals who have lost a limb or live with a paralyzed body part. Our study reveals that the ways in which these individuals express their pain experience is an integral aspect of that experience. The material consists of interviews undertaken with men who are living with phantom pain resulting from a traumatic injury. The phenomenological analysis is inspired by (...) Zahavi :151–167, 2001) and Merleau-Ponty. On a descriptive level the metaphors these patients invoke to describe their condition reveal immense suffering, such as a feeling of being invaded by insects or of their skin being scorched and stripped from their body. Such metaphors express a dimension of experience concerning the self that is in pain and others whom the sufferer relates to through this pain, as well as the agony that this pain inflicts in the world of lived experience. This pain has had a profound impact on their lives and altered their relationship with self, others and the world. Their phantom pain has become a reminder of their formerly intact and functioning body; they describe the contrast between their past and present body as an ambiguous and disturbing experience. We conclude that these sensitive and personalized experiences of phantom pain illuminates how acts of expression—spoken pain—constitute a fundamental dimension of a first-person perspective which contribute to the field of knowledge about “phantom pain”. (shrink)

Amputation of a limb can result in the persistent hallucination that the limb is still present [Ramachandran and Hirstein, 1998]. Distressingly, these socalled ‘phantom limbs’ are often quite painful. Of a friend whose arm had been amputated due to gas gangrene, W.K. Livingston writes: I once asked him why the sense of tenseness in the hand was so frequently emphasized among his complaints. He asked me to clench my fingers over my thumb, flex my wrist, and raise the arm (...) into a hammerlock position and hold it there. He kept me in this position as long as I could stand it. At the end of five minutes I was perspiring freely, my hand and arm felt unbearably cramped, and I quit. But you can take your hand down, he said. (quoted in [Melzack, 1973] 53) In addition to the obvious medical issues, phantom limb pain also presents philosophical problems. Here’s a thorny one: are phantom limb pains hallucinations of pain? (shrink)

This paper analyzes S. Weir Mitchell and his son John Kearsley Mitchell’s views on phantom limb pain in late 19th c. America. Drawing on a variety of primary sources including journal articles, letters, and treatises, the paper pioneers analysis of a cache of surveys sent out by the Mitchells that contain amputee Civil War veterans’ own narratives of phantom limb pain. The paper utilizes an approach drawn from the history of ideas, documenting how changing models of (...) medicine and objectivity help explain the Mitchells’s attitudes, practices, and beliefs regarding the enigma of phantom limb pain as experienced by their patients. The paper also assesses concerns over malingering, pain, authenticity, and deception through these intellectual frameworks of somaticism and mechanical objectivity. The paper concludes that much of relevance to the ways in which the Mitchells and other late 19th c. neurologists regarded and treated their patients’ pain is explicable in terms of the larger intellectual frameworks that structured these healers’ ideas about lesionless pain. (shrink)

One of the most promising trends both in the neuroscience of pain and in psychiatric treatments of chronic pain is the focus on mental imagery. My aim is to argue that if we take these findings seriously, we can draw very important and radical philosophical conclusions. I argue that what we pretheoretically take to be pain is partly constituted by sensory stimulation-driven pain processing and partly constituted by mental imagery. This general picture can explain some problematic (...) cases of pain perception, for example, phantom-limb pain, and it also has important consequences for some recent philosophical debates about the nature and content of pain. (shrink)

This paper brings neuroscientific experiments into relation with concepts from phenomenological philosophy to investigate phantom sensations from the perspective of embodied subjectivity. Using a mirror device to create intersensory effects in subjects experiencing phantom sensations, one can create illusions aiming at alleviating phantom pain. Neuroplasticity as a general property of the brain and cortical remapping as a specific mechanism underlying the success of this procedure are interpreted with the phenomenological notions of body image, body schema, and (...) body memory. It is argued that a phantom can be understood as an ambiguous unity of body-imagistic neglect and body-schematic remembering. This neurophenomenological approach highlights the significance of the polarity of subjective-objective embodied experience one the one hand, and the spatial and temporal horizons of the emergence of phantoms on the other. Thereby, implicit and explicit forms of remembering, habitual and reflective modes of behavioural and cognitive self-representation and -understanding can be compared according to how the body integrates its various sensations. (shrink)

Pains that persist long after damaged tissue hasrecovered remain a perplexing phenomenon. Theseso-called chronic pains serve no useful function foran organism and, given its disabling effects, mighteven be considered maladaptive. However, a remarkablesimilarity exists between the neural bases thatunderlie the hallmark symptoms of chronic pain andthose that subserve learning and memory. Bothphenomena, wind-up in the pain literature andlong-term potentiation (LTP) in the learning andmemory literature, are forms of neuroplasticity inwhich increased neural activity leads to a longlasting increase in (...) the excitability of neuronsthrough structural modifications at pre- andpost-synaptic sites. Moreover, the synapticmodifications of wind-up and LTP share a commonmechanism: a glutamate N -methyl-D-aspartate(NMDA) receptor interaction that initiates a calciummediated biochemical cascade that ultimately enhancessignal processing at the -amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazoleproprionic acid (AMPA) receptor. This paper arguesthat chronic pain, which has no adaptive value, canbe accounted for in terms of the highly adaptivephenomenon of activity-dependent neural plasticity;hence, some cases of chronic pain can beconceptualized as a memory trace in spinal neurons. (shrink)

Almost everyone who has a limb amputated will experience a phantom limb--the vivid impression that the limb is not only still present, but in some cases, painful. There is now a wealth of empirical evidence demonstrating changes in cortical topography in primates following deafferentation or amputation, and this review will attempt to relate these in a systematic way to the clinical phenomenology of phantom limbs. With the advent of non-invasive imaging techniques such as MEG (magnetoencephalogram) and functional MRI, (...) topographical reorganization can also be demonstrated in humans, so that it is now possible to track perceptual changes and changes in cortical topography in individual patients. We suggest, therefore, that these patients provide a valuable opportunity not only for exploring neural plasticity in the adult human brain but also for understanding the relationship between the activity of sensory neurons and conscious experience. We conclude with a theory of phantom limbs, some striking demonstrations of phantoms induced in normal subjects, and some remarks about the relevance of these phenomena to the question of how the brain constructs a 'body image.'. (shrink)

: Traditional definitions of pain assume that an individual learns about pain through verbal usages related to the experience of injury in early life. This emphasis on the verbal correlates of pain restricts our understanding of pain to the context of adult human consciousness. In this paper we instead support the idea that our understanding of pain originates in neonatal experience and is not merely a verbally determined phenomenon. We also challenge the definition of (...) class='Hi'>pain as a merely sensory message related to peripheral tissue trauma. We aim to move beyond this definition by considering the relationship between the centre and periphery, taking into account certain phenomena such as phantom limbs and interoception. We show that pain helps an individual to develop a sense of awareness of himself immersed in a social context, and is thus a complex and adaptive phenomenon, that supports bodily integrity and social behavior. Keywords : Awareness; Consciousness; Experience; Pain; Self-representation Dolore e coscienza negli esseri umani. Ovvero, perché il dolore favorisce l’identità e la rappresentazione di sé Riassunto : La definizione classica di dolore presuppone che l’individuo ne apprenda l'uso verbale attraverso esperienze dolorifiche legate all’infanzia, favorendo una maggiore attenzione per i correlati verbali del dolore. Questo spesso relega il dolore nel contesto della coscienza dell’uomo adulto. Il presente lavoro si propone, in primo luogo, di sottolineare alcune evidenze, a partire dall'esperienza neonatale, a sostegno dell’idea di dolore come esperienza umana e non solo come fenomeno determinato verbalmente. Un secondo aspetto emerge dalla definizione di dolore, il concepirlo come un semplice messaggio sensoriale in seguito a lesioni dei tessuti periferici. Ci si propone, pertanto, di andare oltre tale ipotesi considerando il rapporto tra centro e periferia, a partire da alcuni fenomeni come l’arto fantasma e l’interocezione. Il dolore aiuta inoltre a sviluppare un senso di consapevolezza di sé immerso nel contesto sociale; si tratta dunque di un fenomeno complesso e adattivo, dall’integrità fisica alla dimensione sociale. Parole chiave : Consapevolezza; Coscienza; Esperienza; Dolore; Rappresentazione di sé. (shrink)

Two views on the nature and location of pain are usually contrasted. According to the first, experientialism, pain is essentially an experience, and its bodily location is illusory. According to the second, perceptualism or representationalism, pain is a perceptual or representational state, and its location is to be traced to the part of the body in which pain is felt. Against this second view, the cases of phantom, referred and chronic pain have been marshalled: (...) all these cases apparently show that one can be in pain while not having anything wrong in her body. Pain bodily location, then, would be illusory. I this paper I shall defend the representational thesis by presenting an argument against experientialism while conceding that the appearance / reality distinction collapses. A crucial role in such identification is played by deictics. In reporting that we feel pain here, the deictic directly refers to the bodily part as coinciding with the part as represented. So, pain location is not illusory. The upshot is that the body location is part and parcel of the representational content of pain states, a representation built up from the body map. (shrink)

The paper identifies in Cartesian dualism a common target of the middle Wittgenstein and the early Merleau-Ponty. By relegating pain to mental awareness and location to bodily extension, Cartesian dualism renders common localizations of pain throughout the body as unintelligible ascriptions. Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s efforts to do justice to common localizations of pain illuminate one another. In their light, Cartesian dualism involves an objectification and a deappropriation of one’s body. Further, Wittgenstein’s acknowledgment of a heterogeneous multiplicity of (...) corporeal spaces (e.g. tactile space, feeling space) restores the view, reinforced by Merleau-Ponty, that corporeal pain is intimately related to corporeal localization, while corporeal space is not a continuation of the physical space of things. (shrink)

Explores the wealth of evidence for the reality of the human biofield. Looks at how energy therapies are now gaining acceptance due to irrefutable proof of their effectiveness for everything from PTSD to phantom limb pain. Examines the power of group energetics and team chemistry. Explains how the builders of Stonehenge and other sacred sites harnessed Earth energy and explores the subtle energetics of crop circles.

made with any ambitions for ontological reduction (e.g. denying that there are pains but only states of having pain). So I'm afraid that Tye's objections deriving from attributing to me such a view and pointing out that Representationalism is needed to capture, amongst other things, the fact that we experience pains in phantom limbs are all beside the point. Instead, the question is entirely a matter of whether the inferences mentioned in my original paper and Tye's reply fail (...) because, although the 'in'. (shrink)

In his response, Michael Tye writes as if I reject Representationalism about pain. But in my original paper (Noordhof 2001) I hoped to make clear that I did not. For instance, I remarked that I had sympathy with the position (95) and, on the subsequent page, outlined what I thought the Represen- tationalist should say. My proposal was that when we experience a pain in the finger, the experience is veridical only if the cause of this experience is (...) a disordered state of the finger. My appeal to the notion of a state was not made with any ambitions for ontological reduction (e.g. denying that there are pains but only states of having pain). So I’m afraid that Tye’s objections deriving from attributing to me such a view and pointing out that Repre- sentationalism is needed to capture, amongst other things, the fact that we experience pains in phantom limbs are all beside the point. (shrink)

Common sense -- African slavery in America -- An occasional letter on the female sex -- Agrarian justice -- The rights of man -- The age of reason.

This target article examines the clinical and experimental evidence for a role of peripheral and central hyperexcitability in persistent pain in four key areas: cutaneous hyperalgesia, referred pain, neuropathic pain, and postoperative pain. Each suggests that persistent pain depends not only on central sensitization, but also on inputs from damaged peripheral tissue. It is instructive to think of central sensitization as comprised of both an initial central sensitization and an ongoing central sensitization driven by inputs (...) from peripheral sources. Each of these factors, initial sensitization, ongoing central sensitization, and inputs from peripheral sources, contributes to the net activity in dorsal horn neurons and thus influences the expression of persistent pain or hyperalgesia. Since each factor, peripheral inputs and central sensitization (initial or ongoing), can contribute to both the initiation and maintenance of persistent pain, therapies should target both peripheral and central sources of pathology. (shrink)

Selections from Paine's Common sense, Dissertation of the first principles of government, and Dissertations on government, the affairs of the bank, and paper money, along with several American federal documents and state constitutions, all in Spanish.

Mental health has become a key concern within social discourse in recent years, and with it, the discussion about the lived experience of pain. In dealing with this experience there has been a shift away from merely relying on medical care towards more holistic approaches involving community support, public awareness, and social change. However, little if any attention has been paid in this context to the contribution of aesthetic experience engendered by art that expresses and publicly shares with others (...) the lived experience of pain. With reference to Phantom Limb, an art exhibition curated by Euan Grey and held at the Victoria Galleries and Museum Liverpool in 2016, I argue that aesthetic experience plays a crucial role in making sense of pain and suffering, thus breaking new ground in the appreciation of the significance of art for public mental health and holistic approaches towards patients. (shrink)

Acclaimed historian Peter LInebaugh provides an original examination of Paine's works and legacy in the introduction to these two influential arguments for liberty of political thought--including Common Sense, which inspired the American Revolution, and The Rights of Man, a defense of the French Revolution. Original.

A collection of writings by Thomas Paine previously unseen since their first appearance, including political pieces, private letters and verse. Covers his Common Sense years in the revolutionary American colonies; his time in Europe, when he published Rights of Man and The Age of Reason ; and his last years in the firmly united states of America.

This is a new release of the original 1942 edition.

v. 1. Life of Thomas Paine, by W.M. Van der Weyde.--v. 2. Early essays. Common sense. The American crisis, I-IV.--v. 3. The American crisis, V-XIII. Patriotic papers.--v. 4. Political pamphlets.--v. 5. Open letters. Dissertations.--v. 6. Rights of man.--v. 7. Rights of man, concluded. Miscellaneous essays.--v. 8. The age of reason.--v. 9. Theological discussions.--v. 10. Miscellany. Songs and rhymes. Index.

Explore Thomas Paine's political and philosophical ideology in this collection of his most famous works.

Introduction.--From Common sense.--From The American crisis.--From Rights of man.--From Dissertation on first principles of government.--From The age of reason.--From Letter to George Washington.

Written in the years from 1792 to 1795 while Thomas Paine was in prison, The Age of Reason shocked 18th-century readers with its attack on the conventions of Christianity. Based on years of study and reflection by the author, the work is written from the deist point of view and questions Christian beliefs and the role of religion in society. Its resonance remains undiminished after two centuries, and it continues to influence thinkers around the world.

We can call Thomas Paine-eminent Founder, verbal bomb-thrower, Deist, revolutionary, and rationalist-the spark of the American Revolution. In his influential pamphlets, Paine codified both colonial outrage and the intellectual justification for independence, arguing consistently and convincingly for Enlightenment values and the power of the people. He was a master of political rhetoric, from the sarcastic insult to the diplomatic aperçu. Today, we are living in times that, as Paine said, try men's souls. Whatever your politics, if you're seeking a new (...) Paine-with rhetoric to ignite social and political transformations-where better to start than at the source? This is a work that provides quotes from Thomas Paine's writings. (shrink)

Thomas Paine often declared himself a citizen of the world. This Norton Critical Edition presents Paine and his writing within the transatlantic and global context of the revolutionary ideas and actions of his time. Thomas Paine's loyalties were with universal and self-evident principles rather than with a particular group or nation, and it is this dimension that informed his most important works. This Norton Critical Edition shows how Paine's fury at the British Empire, including its injustices to South Asians and (...) Africans, shaped his first best seller, Common Sense, and how his direct involvement with the French Revolution pushed his ideas toward a unique form of democratic radicalism. Together with his rejection of organized religion, Paine's radicalism resulted in his being one of the most hated men in both monarchial Britain and republican America. This volume includes J. M. Opal's introduction, "Thomas Paine and the Revolutionary Enlightenment, 1770s-90s," which provides essential biographical and historical details across three tumultuous decades. Paine's most important works-from Common Sense (1776) through Agrarian Justice (1796)-are reprinted and are accompanied by explanatory annotations. Supporting materials include a wide range of documents from the turbulent years following the publication of both Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence. These include Pennsylvania's gradual emancipation statute of the 1780s, an ex-slave's impassioned call for revolutionary violence against European imperialists and masters, and a British conservative's witty rejoinder to Paine's vision of a brave new world. Four major interpretations of Paine's work are provided by Nathan R. Perl-Rosenthal, Robert A. Ferguson, Gary Kates, and Gregory Claeys. A Selected Bibliography is also included. (shrink)

Explore Thomas Paine's political and philosophical ideology in this collection of his most famous works.

I. Rights of man; being the first volume of an entirely new and unabridged issue. Ed. by Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, with a biographical and critical introduction by John M. Robertson. -- II. The age of reason; being the second volume of an entirely new and unabridged issue of the chief works of Thomas paine. Ed., with historical introduction, by Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner.