The Value of Suffering: An Interdisciplinary Investigation of the Nature, Meaning, and Role of Affective Experience

Is suffering good? Encompassing both physical pain and emotions such as grief and disappointment, suffering is almost universally considered bad. But, as Sir John Templeton emphasised, it also has value. Hence we aim to illuminate the complex and frequently neglected ways in which suffering is also good. We will investigate suffering’s role, its place in our rational lives, and its conscious phenomenology, thus illuminating the value of suffering and of affective experience generally—not just suffering, but pleasure too. Important to us all, suffering also lies at some fruitful disciplinary intersections. So our project centrally involves an international, multidisciplinary team, expert in philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, value theory, neuroscience, psychology, and clinical practice. Our activities will include six workshops and three major international conferences over 33 months. Building on interdisciplinary engagement at our workshops, team members and other experts will produce important papers on our core questions for dissemination at our conferences and in our edited collections. In addition to the two edited collections issuing from this interdisciplinary collaboration, our core team (comprising two Principal Investigators, a Postdoctoral Fellow, and ideally a PhD Student) will produce a monograph and ten journal articles. Reaching beyond the academy, we will also give public lectures, write popular articles, and maintain a project website featuring an interactive blog. Drawing on the networks we build, our longer term objective is a Centre for Affective Experience in Glasgow: a world-leading hub for interdisciplinary research, collaboration, dissemination, and public engagement. In all these ways, we aim to enhance the profile and understanding of suffering and affective consciousness—this crucial, neglected dimension of human experience—within and beyond the academy, not only during the project but long after its completion.