Maja Sidzińska

Anna Smajdor and Joona Räsänen argue that pregnancy should be classified as a disease (2025). But their argument faces a problem not yet raised by other critics (see Baron 2025; Colgrove and Rodger 2025; Rezkalla and Smith 2025). To classify a phenomenon, e.g., pregnancy, as belonging to a category, e.g., disease, one must characterize the category as well as the phenomenon. But Smajdor and Räsänen do neither. Indeed, they reject every apparent candidate theory of disease, and they do not define pregnancy. The closest they come to characterizing disease is positing the converse of Quill Kukla’s criteria for non-disease (2019). The converse of Kukla’s criteria are: (1) there is agreement and consistency between definitions, (2) a unified physical syndrome is present, (3) the risks are medical rather than social, and (4) the risks are not only ‘risks’ within a particular set of social values (Smajdor and Räsänen 2025, 42). Smajdor and Räsänen then claim that pregnancy meets these criteria. But contra what they argue, I show that pregnancy fails to meet these criteria, or that, at best, whether or not pregnancy meets some of them is not established. If Smajdor and Räsänen abandon even those suggested criteria, however, they have no basis for classifying pregnancy—whatever it is—in any way at all. On these grounds, I contend they have not shown that pregnancy should be classified as a disease.

This book promotes entirely new insights into women’s contributions to the history of philosophy and boasts papers spanning the centuries from Antigone until twentieth century phenomenology, covering fields from logic to mysticism, stretching from Brazil to Early Modern Europe. The book is of interest for all scholars and students of the history of philosophy, but especially for those who are interested in women philosophers and in new narratives in the history of philosophy. The book is representative of the immense scope of academic discussion women were involved in over the centuries as well as their varying styles and methods. It features papers in logic and in mysticism, presents papers on female authors in Antiquity and in the twenty-first century and it includes papers on phenomenology and analytic philosophy. The chapters consider philosophical positions in literature and drama, in letters and in classical philosophical treatises, ensuring this book contributes significantly to research on the individual women authors, who are all to date still understudied figures.

Life cycle diagrams are ubiquitous in a variety of scientific materials, ranging from introductory biology textbooks to professional publications. These diagrams typically depict stages of a particular organism’s life connected by arrows, such as, for a frog: egg(s) → embryo → tadpole → tadpole with two legs → tadpole with four legs → young frog → adult frog → egg(s). In this paper, we present a critique of this sort of life cycle diagram, drawing on both metaphysics and epistemology of science. We suggest that these diagrams do not accurately represent an organism’s life stages, its reproduction, or species persistence. These misrepresentations have implications for scientific reasoning, explanatory efficacy, as well as pedagogical efficacy. To address the shortcomings of these diagrams, we propose a new kind of diagram which we call the life spiral diagram. The life spiral diagram more accurately reflects an organism’s life stages, its reproduction, as well as species persistence. Thus, the life spiral diagram better aids scientific reasoning, explanations of life processes, and learning.

This paper offers a pragmatist interpretation of Ian Hacking’s version of entity realism, and shows that such an interpretation enables the view to withstand a number of objections. Specifically, the paper shows Hacking’s rejection of a representationalist epistemology, which realist critics unjustifiably attribute to him, and shows his endorsement of a Deweyan pragmatist epistemology instead. If the interpretation is correct, the objections (a) that entity manipulation is theory-laden, (b) that the concept of home truths cannot do the work Hacking envisioned, (c) that entity realism is a form of inference to the best explanation (IBE), (d) that some real entities aren’t manipulable, and (e) that some non-real entities are manipulable, lose much of their force. Objections (a), (b), and (c) rest on a metaepistemological misunderstanding, while objections (d) and (e) are addressed with (pragmatist) clarifications. This paper also offers a novel pragmatist argument for entity realism: the argument from technology. The argument from technology maintains that the reality of the entities that constitute our technologies is a precondition for those technologies’ meaningful use. In this case, entity realism remains a more viable perspective on science than is commonly acknowledged.

This article introduces the Philosophy in the Wild collection. Philosophy in the Wild asks how ways of doing philosophy impact the kinds of philosophy being done and the kinds of philosophical engagement that are possible. We think that taking philosophy outside of its usual fluorescent, wired context would open up new ways of theorizing our relation to the world, as well as create new ways of engaging with philosophy. Thus Philosophy in the Wild hosts outdoor and technology-free conferences and workshops. Our goal is to foster a more engaged and contemplative mode of doing philosophy.

Émilie Du Châtelet was a fictionalist about mathematics. Mathematical fictionalism (henceforth, fictionalism) is the view that, strictly speaking, mathematical entities such as numbers, functions, and sets, are fictions that are useful for human purposes, but are not themselves real in an ontological sense. I first explain fictionalism. Then I illustrate Du Châtelet’s position with regard to mathematical entities and give textual evidence of her fictionalism from Institutions de Physique. I offer a sketch of the philosophical-scientific issues that motivated Du Châtelet’s fictionalism: explaining the behavior of bodies, as well as the ontological extraneity of mathematical entities, had they been taken to be real abstracta. Finally, I argue that Du Châtelet’s fictionalism was plausibly motivated by Leibniz’s, Wolff’s, and other mathematicians’ views who themselves held fictionalist positions with regard to certain mathematical issues. Although I project onto Du Châtelet a philosophical position which was not identified as such at the time of her writing, I do so with the aim of highlighting her systematicity and making sense of her priorities, as well as showing a link between historical and contemporary uses of fictions, and issues in the metaphysics of science.

Given Descartes’ metaphysical and natural-philosophic commitments, it is very difficult to theorize the pregnant human being as a human being under his system. Specifically, given (1) Descartes’ 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 which may clearly be the subject of pregnancy. The incompatibility of any of the three options found in (4) with (1), (2), or (3), together with other undesirable consequences should any be selected, results in what I call the pregnancy problem. The pregnancy problem (henceforth, PP) is a previously unconsidered problem for the Cartesian philosophy. Given PP, commitment(s) (1), (2), (3) or (4), or a combination of these, would have to be revised for Descartes’ system to avoid a variety of tensions; alternately, counterintuitive consequences may have to be accepted. Ironically, given Descartes’ 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.

Basic understandings of subjectivity are derived from the principles of masculine embodiment such as temporal stability and singularity. But pregnancy challenges such understandings because it represents a sort of splitting of the body. In the pregnant situation, a subject may experience herself as both herself and an other, as well as neither herself nor an other. This is logically untenable—an impossibility. If our discourse depends on singular, fixed referents, then what paradigms of identity are available to the pregnant subject? What could be the pregnant subject's ontology? Eric Bapteste and John Dupré offer the idea that organisms are processual beings. In their view, the ecological interrelationships between the objects of biology are defining, and render them dynamic processes, rather than stable things. Does Bapteste and Dupré’s processual ontological account accommodate pregnant organisms, including pregnant people? Here, I analyze the processual account and determine whether it can accommodate the phenomenon of pregnancy. I find that a processual ontology captures a great deal about pregnant embodiment and is a significant improvement over Cartesian and anti-metaphysical accounts. However, in order to accommodate pregnancy, what we still need from an ontology is the inclusion of subjectivity.