Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps

it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream

van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds,

music, radio, podcasts. Hello, you're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast. I'm Heta Howes, and this edition is part of our series New Thinking, looking at new research in UK universities.

Now, have you ever thought about what happens, not when two become one, as recently reunited spice girls might have it but when

one becomes two today I'm joined by Elsa Line Kingma Fiona Woolard and Suki Finn from the

University of Southampton and they're all working together on a project called bump and that might

give you a little bit of a clue about what we're talking about today.

The full name is better understanding the metaphysics of pregnancy.

It's part of a bigger research project that looks at the philosophy of pregnancy and early motherhood.

But before we unravel all the metaphysics, I want to ask you, why pregnancy?

Elsa Lyon, your sort of research leader of this project,

what sparked the interest? Why pregnancy?

Thank you for the question.

So lots of people always expect me to say something about becoming pregnant, and that's actually not true.

So my interest was sparked years ago when I was a graduate student and I was thinking about a particular

philosophical problem called the non-identity problem that has to do with whether we can harm

people who do not yet exist by bringing them into existence rather than other people. I'll spare

you the technical details. But thinking about

that problem, I always thought that it matters that these people don't randomly emerge,

but that they are made and come out of somebody. And that really was what set me off on the path

of thinking that there would be much more to be said and thought about pregnancy than currently happens.

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