Version 1
: Received: 9 October 2019 / Approved: 11 October 2019 / Online: 11 October 2019 (05:38:00 CEST)
How to cite:
Nuño de la Rosa, L.; Pavlicev, M.; Etxeberria, A. Rethinking the Individuality of Pregnancy: Eutherian Pregnancy as an Evolved Relational Novelty. Preprints2019, 2019100127
Nuño de la Rosa, L.; Pavlicev, M.; Etxeberria, A. Rethinking the Individuality of Pregnancy: Eutherian Pregnancy as an Evolved Relational Novelty. Preprints 2019, 2019100127
Nuño de la Rosa, L.; Pavlicev, M.; Etxeberria, A. Rethinking the Individuality of Pregnancy: Eutherian Pregnancy as an Evolved Relational Novelty. Preprints2019, 2019100127
APA Style
Nuño de la Rosa, L., Pavlicev, M., & Etxeberria, A. (2019). Rethinking the Individuality of Pregnancy: Eutherian Pregnancy as an Evolved Relational Novelty. Preprints. https://doi.org/
Chicago/Turabian Style
Nuño de la Rosa, L., Mihaela Pavlicev and Arantza Etxeberria. 2019 "Rethinking the Individuality of Pregnancy: Eutherian Pregnancy as an Evolved Relational Novelty" Preprints. https://doi.org/
Abstract
The question of how to conceive of the relation between the pregnant female and the embryo has become a recent focus of debate in the philosophical literature. Here we consider this problem in the context of current debates on individuality in the philosophy of biology by looking at how pregnancy is individuated in different disciplinary contexts. Firstly, we review different notions of biological individuality in the literature, examine how each of them applies to the case of pregnancy, and claim that recent work on the evolution of eutherian reproduction offers insights for new criteria for rethinking the individuality of pregnancy. Then, we reconstruct the main assumptions underlying the established biological account of pregnancy. Finally, we develop an alternative account based on the hypothesis that pregnancy is an evolved relational novelty and maintain that pregnant females are conceived as historical reproductive individuals. In the final section before the conclusions, we discuss how the historical reproductive biological individuality of pregnancy differs from, and coexists with, other views of individuality, and examine some of its consequences.
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
