Welcome

Suffering is an ubiquitous experience with no universally accepted theoretical framework for its understanding. Scholars working in single disciplines in the area of Suffering and Pain offer one-dimensional accounts, often irreducible and not related to views provided by other fields on the same matters. As a result, we face an explanatory gap between diverse interpretations, limiting our understanding and reducing our proficiency to alleviate the pain undergone. To develop a more integrative account of these phenomena, an interdisciplinary effort is required. The aim of this programme is thus to provide a novel transdisciplinary research tool, which will give scientists and humanists alike access to knowledge in their respective fields. In bringing together figures from numerous domains, including humanities, biomedical, and natural sciences, for a constructive interaction on the topic, we may combine both theoretical and experimental work, to fill the gap that exists to date.

Going back

A collaboration between Smadar Bustan, a philosopher visiting the Philosophy Department at Harvard University, and Catherine Kerr, a neuroscientist at the Osher Research Center, Harvard Medical School, nucleated the endeavor at the base of this project. To leap even further, the exposed diversity of materials and methods for investigating the ills of life made it clear that science and humanities need go hand in hand in better concomitance.
With the initial support of a European Science Foundation award, we thus set the ground for a long-term interdisciplinary and international Working Group on Suffering and Pain, involving scholars, scientists and doctors in sociology, philosophy, narrative medicine, psychology, pain research, neuroscience, ethics and human geography.

Looking forward

A first outcome will be an integrative publication, to serve as a reference tool for the different disciplines. This oeuvre will expose the connections and the divides related to the question of Suffering and Pain that arise from divergences between sciences and humanities, including their radically different approaches to the problem.
A longer-term collaborative research intends to identify unaddressed issues, tackling them with a network of experiments carried by the collaborators and nourished by the multidisciplinary exchanges.