Copyright

Alison Stone

Published On

2026-07-16

Language

  • English

Print Length

20 pages

THEMA

  • QDTQ
  • QD
  • QDTJ
  • JPA
  • JH

BISAC

  • PHI005000
  • PHI019000
  • PHI009000
  • PHI022000
  • POL028000

Keywords

  • Victorian philosophy
  • Ethics
  • Metaphysics
  • Religion
  • History
  • Feminism

1. Introducing the Philosophy of Julia Wedgwood

Chapter of: The Philosophy of Julia Wedgwood: Imperfect Antithesis

This chapter introduces Julia Wedgwood (1833-1913) and her idea of imperfect antithesis, which organises her views on a spectrum of issues: pain and pleasure; selfishness and self-sacrifice; the self and relationships with others; free will and determinism; the natural and the supernatural. She also gives imperfect antithesis a historical dimension, as the ‘law of recoil’ or the ‘law of inversion’, in which we naturally recoil from one form of social life towards an opposite one. The chapter then situates Wedgwood in her context, including her family background and place in Victorian print culture and publishing. The chapter outlines some of her most important influences and interlocutors: Charles Darwin, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Erskine, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Aristotle, and – a negative influence – John Stuart Mill. I discuss how Wedgwood negotiated the conventions of Victorian culture, working her way up to become one of the country’s best-known intellectual women. However, she often published anonymously in the Spectator, and this creates a challenge. This book uses a mixture of digital and archival methods to attribute a large number of anonymous essays to her.

Contributors

Alison Stone

(author)
Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster University
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9621-8263

Alison Stone is Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster University. Her most recent books are on nineteenth-century women philosophers. They are Frances Power Cobbe: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Feminist Philosopher (Oxford University Press, 2022), Frances Power Cobbe (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2023), and Women on Philosophy of Art: Britain 1770-1900 (Oxford University Press, 2024). With Charlotte Alderwick, she co-edited Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in Britain and America (Routledge, 2024), and with Lydia Moland, she co-edited The Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2025).