Skip to main navigationSkip to main content
The University of Southampton
Humanities

Dr Anne Sophie Meincke 

Senior Research Fellow

Dr Anne Sophie Meincke's photo
Related links
Personal homepage

Dr Anne Sophie Meincke is a Research Fellow on the project 'Better Understanding the Metaphysics of Pregnancy' (BUMP) at the University of Southampton.

Before coming to Southampton, Anne Sophie was a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK, and at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She holds a PhD from University of Munich, Germany, where she was a research and teaching assistant.

Within the BUMP project, Anne Sophie elaborates a process view of mammalian pregnancy according to which a pregnant mammalian individual is a hypercomplex biological higher-order process that asymmetrically bifurcates. With respect to human pregnancy specifically, Anne Sophie also investigates the implications of a process perspective for personal identity and human personhood.

Anne Sophie’s work on a process view of pregnancy contributes to her overall project of developing a comprehensive metaphysics of the human person that takes seriously both the biological and the processual nature of human persons.

Recently, Anne Sophie has been awarded a prestigious Elise Richter research grant by the Austrian Science Fund to carry out an interdisciplinary four year-research project on “Bio-Agency and Natural Freedom” at the University of Vienna, Austria (from September 2019).

Research interests

Anne Sophie’s research is located at the intersection of metaphysics and the philosophy of biology. Topics of her work, apart from the metaphysics of pregnancy, include personhood and personal identity, biological identity and the concept of life, agency and free will, dispositional realism, persistence, the nature of processes and meta-metaphysics. She is also interested in, and has written about, the history of philosophy, especially post-Kantian European philosophy.

For detailed information on Anne Sophie’s research visit Anne Sophie's website and Anne Sophie's academia web page.

Research project(s)

Philosophy of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood

Better Understanding the Metaphysics of Pregnancy (BUMP): Organisms, Identity, Personhood and Persistence

Pregnancy presents us with fascinating philosophical problems: what, during the pregnancy, is the nature of the relationship between the foetus and the maternal organism? What is the relationship between the pregnant organism and the later baby? And when does one person or organism become two? A 1.2 million Euro research grant from the ERC allows Elselijn Kingma and her research team to address these and other questions in a 5 year research project starting in spring 2016.

Dr Anne Sophie Meincke
Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Southampton, Avenue Campus, Southampton. SO17 1BF United Kingdom
Dr Anne Sophie Meincke's personal home page
Share this profile Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter Share this on Weibo
Privacy Settings