Royal Holloway University of London, London, United Kingdom.
J Med Philos. 2023 May 16;48(3):283-298. doi: 10.1093/jmp/jhad017.
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.
（1）某种新的生物体何时开始存在？（2）怀孕的生物体与其所怀的物体之间的整体论和拓扑关系是什么？尽管文献中有假设，但我认为这两个问题是相互独立的，即一个问题的答案并不能提供另一个问题的答案。我认为，将它们联系起来的方法是通过一个最大化原则，该原则防止一个生物体成为另一个同种生物体的适当部分。话虽如此，但这样的最大化原则不必成立，并且在怀孕的情况下可能不适用。因此，本文的目的是区分和联系这些形而上学问题，以便概述从其答案的各种组合中得出的怀孕的各种竞争整体论拓扑模型的分类法。
