Given Descartes’s metaphysical and natural-philosophic commitments, it is difficult to theorize the pregnant human being as a human being under his system. Specifically, given (1) Descartes’s account of generation; (2) his commitment to mechanistic explanations where bodies are concerned; (3) his reliance on a subtle individuating principle for human (and animal) bodies; and (4) his metaphysics of human beings, which include minds, bodies, and mind-body unions, there is no available human substance or entity that may clearly be the subject of (...) pregnancy. The incompatibility of any of the three options found in commitment 4 with commitment 1, 2, or 3, together with other undesirable consequences should any be selected, results in what I call the pregnancy problem. The pregnancy problem is a previously unconsidered problem for the Cartesian philosophy. Given the pregnancy problem, commitment 1, 2, 3, or 4, or a combination of these would have to be revised for Descartes’s system to avoid a variety of tensions; alternatively, counterintuitive consequences may have to be accepted. Ironically, given Descartes’s interest in generation and medicine more generally, the Cartesian framework struggles to accommodate pregnancy in human beings. This may have implications for the systematicity and sex neutrality of dualist metaphysics in general. (shrink)

Consider the following two metaphysical questions about pregnancy: (1) When does a new organism of a certain kind start to exist? (2) What is the mereological and topological relationship between the pregnant organism and with what it is pregnant? Despite assumptions made in the literature, I take these questions to be independent of each other, such that an answer to one does not provide an answer to the other. I argue that the way to connect them is via a maximality (...) principle that prevents one organism being a proper part of another organism of the same kind. That being said, such a maximality principle need not be held, and may not apply in the case of pregnancy. The aims of this paper are thus to distinguish and connect these metaphysical questions, in order to outline a taxonomy of rival mereotopological models of pregnancy that result from the various combinations of their answers. (shrink)

Elselijn Kingma argues that, in cases of mammalian placental pregnancy, the foster (roughly, the post-implantation embryo/foetus) is part of the gravida (the pregnant organism). But she does not consider the possibility of proper overlap. I show that this generates a number of serious problems for her argument and trace the oversight to a quite general issue within the literature on biological individuality. Doing so provides an opportunity to pull apart and clarify the relations between some importantly distinct questions concerning organismality (...) and organismic parthood, and to identify the implications that this has for those who want to draw on this literature when making metaphysical or mereological arguments. (shrink)