Incomplete Nature (2012) is a bold attempt at a naturalistic account of sentience, emotion, pain, values and meaning - phenomena that are generally not easy to get a handle on in the natural sciences. Deacon is carefully and sensibly trying to build a bridge between physics, biology, the social sciences, and philosophy. The book has been generally greeted with acclaim by the philosophical community and marks a profound shift in thinking that in magnitude has been compared to the shift followed upon the works of Darwin and Einstein. I have for 10-15 years been interested in making sense of pain and suffering and my own role in navigating this muddy landscape together with my patients. Pain … [Read more...] about Adam Bjerre – Incomplete nature – 30DoS #21
No pain, no gain
Reading a recent book on Nurses and Midwives in Nazi Germany: The "Euthanasia Programs" by Susan Benedict and Linda Shields reminded me the that there is often a reluctance to research the darker sides to our professional histories. I remember Dave Holmes once telling me that he received some really aggressive and distressing criticism from his colleagues when his paper Killing for the state: The darkest side of American nursing was published. It seems that people within nursing took exception to someone questioning the morality of nurses who made people comfortable on death row in preparation for the electric chair and the lethal injection. In some ways I can understand this kind of … [Read more...] about No pain, no gain
The Pedagogy of Suffering: Four Fragments
Abstract This paper is a collection of small, formal and informal writings and is part of the early groundwork we have been doing together on the topic of the pedagogy of suffering, a phrase that has certainly given pause to many colleagues we have spoken to. We are trying to understand and articulate how and why suffering can be pedagogical in character and how it is often key to authentic and meaningful acts of teaching and learning. We are exploring threads from both the hermeneutic tradition and from Buddhism, in order to decode our understandable rush to ameliorate suffering at every turn and to consider every instance of it as an error to be avoided at all costs. We also look to these … [Read more...] about The Pedagogy of Suffering: Four Fragments