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

6. Free Will and Determinism

Chapter of: The Philosophy of Julia Wedgwood: Imperfect Antithesis

This chapter is on Wedgwood’s account of free will. For her, we have free will, revealed in immediate first-personal experience, but mostly we have no chance to exercise it and remain caught up in natural determination. She thus holds that voluntarism is true and determinism is also largely true. This is another application of imperfect antithesis. Determination is normal, indeed predominant, yet we still have free will, which enables us to pursue the highest moral ideal, self-sacrifice. She takes a similar view in an essay on Aristotle on free will. She argues that metaphysically the universe is a law-governed and determined whole, but from a first-person perspective we are free to choose between right and wrong. However, this presents a fundamental problem about how we can ever exercise free will if the order of nature is determined.

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).