[Special issue honoring Nikola Grahek] Representationalism in philosophy of perception has become more or less the dominant view. There are various versions of it not all of which are motivated by the same set of concerns. Different metaphysical and epistemological agendas are at work in different strands of the movement. In this paper, I will focus on what has come to be known as strong representationalism. This view has reductive and non-reductive versions, which are usually paired with realist and irrealist (...) versions respectively. First, I will develop a simple, largely empirical, argument against the realist reductive version. Later, rather more briefly, I will extend the argument to cover irrealist representationalism. (shrink)

In 2020, the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) changed its definition of pain to just an "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. " Since then, several philosophers have attempted to reaffirm the impossibility of reducing pain to neurobiology from a variety of approaches, including eliminativism, multiple realizability, and intersubjectivity. All of their arguments assume that there are no specific biomarkers for pain. I adumbrate a more ecumenical path: that while these approaches have some merit, they also misstate (...) how brains function. Once we shift our view regarding how brains operate, then pain processing is just as "mysterious" as other types of complex brain processes. (shrink)

Nikola Grahek's influential book Feeling Pain and Being in Pain introduced philosophers to the strange phenomenon of pain asymbolia. Subsequent philosophical debate around asymbolia has been partly taxonomic: the deep question is whether it is best understood as a specific neurological deficit or part of a broader syndrome. This paper looks to the history of asymbolia, positioning the origin of the term within broader historical trends. It shows that strange phenomena about pain and motivation have always presented interpretive challenges, and (...) suggests that the current debate mirrors a historical split between German and French traditions. This does not resolve the debate, but does help place it within broader scientific and philosophical contexts. (shrink)

I explore some of the connections between Grahek's model of asymbolic pain, as developed in Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, and the contemporary intentionalist discussion over evaluativist and imperativist models of pain. I will sketch a Grahekian version of imperativism that is both true to his main insights and better at confronting some of the challenges that his theory has faced since its publication.

This paper argues in favour of the embodied approach to pain. We start by asserting that an appropriate philosophical treatment of pain must be empirically informed, rather than relying solely on the conceptual analysis typical of what we call "orthodox views of pain. " We then examine contemporary empirically informed views, specifically enactivism and eliminativism, by testing them against the aberrant pain phenomenon, namely chronic pain. This method of using fringe cases and aberrations to test philosophical theories of pain follows (...) the approach of Grahek (2007), who criticized subjectivism and objectivism based on their failure to account for pain asymbolia and congenital analgesia. We contend that the embodied approach holds an advantage over eliminativism and enactivism as it integrates the subjective, phenomenal aspect of pain-understood as a form of perceptual expectation-with the objective behavioural and neurological aspects by proposing a specific top-down connectionist cognitive architecture. We test two predictions of this approach: (1) that pain is multimodal and cognitively penetrable, and (2) that aberrant forms of pain, such as chronic pain, can be modulated not only by manipulating its immediate neurological source but also by altering the multimodal body image through virtual reality (VR) technology and our cognitive states, primarily our expectations about the environment. (shrink)

This paper aims to propose and justify a framework for understanding the concept of personhood in both biological and artificial entities. The framework is based on a set of requirements that make up a suitable cognitive architecture for an entity to be considered a person, including the ability to have propositionally structured intentional states, having a form of sensory capabilities, and having a means of interacting with the environment. The case of individuals in a persistent vegetative state, as studied by (...) Owen, serves as an example to show the importance of each of these requirements and the possibility of a "hybridization" of personhood. The proposed set of requirements provide a complete framework for understanding the concept of personhood and highlight the significance of cognitive architecture in determining personhood. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to clarify the content of the concept “person” as it figures in philosophical debates about personhood and personal identity. In order to do so, I will look at both specific philosophical problems that ask for a clear definition of this notion, as well as at the history of this concept’s formation, and try to motivate the specific assumptions that are tightly connected to it.

I aim to show that, contrary to standard deflationary or eliminativist theories of the self, we can argue from the phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness for the thesis that subjects of experience are substances. The phenomenological datum of subjectivity points to a specific metaphysical structure of our experience, that is, towards the substance view rather than the bundle or the minimal self view. Drawing on modern philosophical accounts of pre-reflective self-awareness, mineness and (self-) acquaintance, I will argue that a subject is (...) aware of being the one individual who has many experiences and that it is revealed to the subject that it is the bearer of experiences and their unifier. The subject is present in pre-reflective awareness and known as the subject of experiences, and even this minimal self-awareness gives us reason to favour the substance view. Thus, one can demonstrate how the debates on the phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness and the metaphysics of selfhood intersect. (shrink)

In special cases of partial twinning, two heads, each supporting a more-orless normal human mental life, emerge from a single torso. It is often argued that there must be two people in such a case, even if there is only one biological organism. That would pose a problem for ‘animalism’, the view that people are organisms. The paper argues that it is very hard to say what sort of non-organisms the people in such cases would be. Reflection on partial twinning (...) is no more comfortable for those who think we’re not organisms than for those who think we are. We may have to accept that a single person could have two separate mental lives. (shrink)