How did the notion of foetal consciousness occur to Shepherd?

At question time, I was asked how it occurred to Shepherd (1827) that foetal consciousness was a phenomenon.

(You can read my answer to this question asked at the April 2017 History of Philosophy Conference Q&A session at the end of my paper on Academia:

https://www.academia.edu/32731707/abridged_paper_presented_6th_April_2017_Lady_Mary_Shepherd_on_the_Afterlife_plus_Q_and_A.docx.pdf).

This question has fascinated me ever since. Where did she get this notion from? Am I right in supposing that it may have come from scientists or could she have come across it in philosophy? Or was she merely expressing an intuition of hers? Is she right in thinking foetuses are capable of a consciousness of sorts? So I have been following up this question by researching what knowledge about foetal consciousness may have existed in the early modern period and how far knowledge has come since then. I am currently writing a paper on it but would also like to outline a few of my research findings here as food for thought for the Lady Mary Shepherd Philosophy Salon to mull over. I hope you find this topic as absorbing and perplexing as I have!

Philosophical background to foetal consciousness:

One mention I have come across about foetuses in the early modern period in philosophy is Arnauld using unborn children’s mind as a counterexample in order to refute Descartes’ claim that we are all conscious of our thoughts¹. Contra Descartes, Arnauld argues for the possibility of having thoughts we are not aware of having.  Arnauld supports this by arguing that foetuses are an exception to Descartes’ claim because they have thoughts without being conscious of having that thought. Arnauld writes:

“The author lays it down as certain that there can be nothing in him, in so far as he is a thinking thing, of which he is not aware [conscius], but it seems to me that this is false. For by ‘himself, in so far as he is a thinking thing,’ he means simply his mind, in so far as it is distinct from his body. But all of us can surely see that there may be many things in our mind of which the mind is not aware [conscius]. The mind of an infant in its mother's womb has the power of thought, but is not aware [conscius] of it. And there are countless similar examples, which I will pass over. (CSM II 150 / AT VII 214)”²

Descartes answers Arnauld by reaffirming his intuition that we are indeed aware of all our thoughts and that foetuses are not an exception to this so his claim remains in tact:

“As to the fact that there can be nothing in the mind, in so far as it is a thinking thing, of which it is not aware [conscius], this seems to me to be self-evident. For there is nothing that we can understand to be in the mind, regarded in this way, that is not a thought or dependent on a thought. If it were not a thought or dependent on a thought it would not belong to the mind qua thinking thing; and we cannot have any thought of which we are not aware [conscius] at the very moment when it is in us. In view of this I do not doubt that the mind begins to think as soon as it is implanted in the body of an infant, and that it is immediately aware [conscius] of its thoughts, even though it does not remember this afterwards because the impressions of these thoughts do not remain in the memory. (CSM II 171–172 / AT VII 246)”³

So Descartes seems to think that Arnauld’s mistake is to assume that a lack of memory of our thoughts when foetuses has misled him to conclude that they are thinking without consciousness/awareness. Nevertheless, I wonder whether this passage could be read differently. What if Arnauld was referring to our capacity to have unconscious thoughts rather than having thoughts that you are aware of at the time but you cannot remember later on? This would better refute Descartes’ claim because it would point out the possibility of thinking without being aware of thinking and thus avoid the problem of whether you remember having thought it at a later date. Whichever way you prefer to interpret Arnauld’s objection to Descartes, it is useful to remember Jorgensen’s (2014) insightful summary of Descartes’ argument as claiming that:

“consciousness, for Descartes, is an intrinsic property of all thoughts (even of the thoughts of infants) by which the subject becomes aware of the thought itself. While this involves reflection, this is not distinct from the thought itself.”⁴

However, the puzzle remains because Shepherd does not refer to Descartes or Arnauld in either of her philosophical treatises. Moreover, they seem to think about consciousness differently from Shepherd (1827) in that they have not taken different levels of consciousness into account, unless we read Arnauld as referring to unconscious thought rather than a subsequent lack of memory. Even so, Shepherd (1827) goes further by positing simple and complex levels of consciousness. So given the difference between the concepts explored in Descartes’ and Arnauld’s correspondence and Shepherd’s philosophy, it still leaves open the question of whether Shepherd could have been convinced by the possibility of foetal consciousness through philosophy. Furthermore, as far as I am aware thus far in my research, foetal consciousness doesn’t seem to feature in summaries of 18th Century philosophy of consciousness either⁵.

This leaves science as a contender for how Shepherd may have been so confident that foetal consciousness was possible that she merely states it boldly and factually in passing without feeling the need to argue for it or explain it to her readers. I shall discuss this in my next blog post.

¹Jorgensen, Larry M., "Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/consciousness-17th  

²ibid

³ibid

⁴ibid

⁵Broadie, Alexander, "Scottish Philosophy in the 18th Century", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/scottish-18th