Lane argues that Charles Peirce’s philosophy can contribute to contemporary debates about the metaphysical and moral status of prenatal humans. Some participants in those debates view an early embryo as numerically identical to, and as having the same moral status as, the adult to which it gives rise; bioethicists in this camp tend to maintain that our metaphysical and moral judgments about prenatal humans are capable of objective truth. Others argue from the continuity of prenatal development to the view that metaphysical judgments about when beings like us begin to exist and moral judgments about when beings like us attain moral status cannot be objective. Lane argues that Peirce provides the resources for developing alternative positions. Those resources are Peirce’s synechism, according to which continuity is of central importance in philosophy, his scholastic realism, according to which there are real kinds, his basic realism, according to which there is a world that is the way it is apart from how anyone represents it to be, and his pragmatic clarifications of the concepts of reality and truth.

In this chapter we look at the earliest stages of life, starting with prenatal development, followed by the birth process, and ending with a description of the physical and behavioral features of the newborn. Although most of this chapter is descriptive – that is, the stages of prenatal development and birth and the behavioral abilities of neonates – we also emphasize how what happens during these earliest times of development sets the stage for what will come later in life.

Early functional neural development is increasingly recognized as important for revealing the developmental origins of human cognitive-motor function and related disorders. Previous studies focusing on fetuses and neonates have revealed sophisticated behaviors and cognitive repertoires, indicating that fetuses begin learning through sensorimotor experience even inside the uterus. Despite accumulating evidence supporting the importance of sensorimotor experience in neural development as early as the fetal period, the developmental mechanisms by which intrauterine sensorimotor experience guides cortical learning, including factors in prenatal experience that are needed for normal development, remain unclear. However, investigating causal links between sensorimotor experience and cortical learning is particularly challenging in human fetuses owing to technical and ethical difficulties. Therefore, computational approaches based on comprehensive biological data about nervous system, body, and environment have been developed to probe mechanisms underlying early functional brain development. In this chapter, we show how an embodied approach focusing on interactions among brain, body, and environment offers opportunities to explore relations between functional neural development and sensorimotor experience.