Copyright

Alison Stone

Published On

2026-07-16

Language

  • English

Print Length

22 pages

THEMA

  • QDTQ
  • QD
  • QDTJ
  • JPA
  • JH

BISAC

  • PHI005000
  • PHI019000
  • PHI009000
  • PHI022000
  • POL028000

Keywords

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

2. The Law of Imperfect Antithesis

Chapter of: The Philosophy of Julia Wedgwood: Imperfect Antithesis

This chapter leads into Wedgwood’s idea of imperfect antithesis, first bringing forward some of her key statements and applications, and then noting three key influences on her idea: Aristotle, Darwin, and Hegel. I discuss three of her applications: gratitude, apologies, and the polarity of remembering and forgetting. These applications show that Wedgwood is not rejecting antithesis; for her, it pervades human life and the universe. But, crucially, real antithesis is imperfect, asymmetrical, and uneven, whereas symmetry is a fictitious construction of the logical intellect. Because Wedgwood upholds the reality of antithesis, she is not quite a proto-deconstructive critic of binary oppositions, although her project does have certain similarities with deconstruction. I then explain that she often writes using double negatives or litotes, her linguistic device for holding imperfect antitheses in view.

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).