The Pain Project

The Pain Project was an international, interdisciplinary research project, which ran January 2012 until 30 June 2013, focusing on relations among pain, perception, and emotion, as well as pain in non-human animals. The Principal Investigators were David Bain and Michael Brady, and the postdoctoral fellow, Jennifer Corns, all based in the Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow.

Located in Glasgow, Paris, and Oslo, the Pain Project's broader project team comprised philosophers of mind and cognitive science, ethicists, neuroscientists, and veterinary scientists (see below).

Involving four workshops and a final conference, the project's outputs included numerous journal articles, a monograph, a collection edited by Bain, Brady, and Corns, and a special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, edited by Bain and Brady.

The project operated under the aegis of the Pain and the Nature of Minds programme, run by the University of Notre Dame and funded by the John Templeton Foundation. It was also associated with Glasgow's Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience.

See here for project themes.

Past Events

The Pain Conference

The Pain Conference was the culmination of the Pain Project's four workshops.

Speakers: Colin Allen, Murat Aydede, David Bain, Michael Brady, Victoria Braithwaite, Jennifer Corns, Valerie Hardcastle, Richard Krueger, Siri Leknes, Adam Shriver, Frederique de Vignemont

Workshops

• Workshop 1. Pain, Unpleasantness, and Motivation. Wednesday 30 May 2012.
• Workshop 2. Pain and Emotion. Saturday 20 October 2012.
• Workshop 3. Pain and Animals. Saturday 2 March 2013.
• Workshop 4. Deviant Pain. Saturday 6 April 2013.

ResearchTeam

• Dr David Bain (PI. University of Glasgow) is a philosopher of mind, who has published a series of papers on pain (see here) and is currently working on motivational and evaluative approaches to pain. (See also here.)
• Dr Michael Brady (PI. University of Glasgow) is a moral philosopher whose principal research area is the philosophy of emotion. He has published numerous papers on the relations between emotion, perception, and value. He is currently completing a monograph on the importance of emotion to our understanding of the evaluative world.
• Dr Jennifer Corns (Postdoctoral Fellow) specialises in philosophy of mind and ethics. Her PhD dissertation, Pain is Not a Natural Kind, was completed under the supervision of Jesse Prinz at the City University of New York Graduate Center. As well as helping to run the project, Dr Corns will conduct and present her own research on some of the project's themes.
• Dr Frédérique de Vignemont (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris) is a philosopher of cognitive science, who has published on bodily awareness and social cognition. She is interested in pain, affective touch, and empathy. (See also here.)
• Dr Siri Leknes (University of Oslo) is a cognitive neuroscientist who has published on pain and pleasure, and has investigated connections between pain, relief, and threat.
• Prof. Jacky Reid, Prof. Marian Scott , and Dr Lesley Wiseman-Orr (University of Glasgow) are members of the Pain and Welfare Research Group and research and publish on the assessment of pain and quality of life in non-human animals.

NB. See here for more on the Pain Project's research themes.