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

7. The Natural and the Supernatural

Chapter of: The Philosophy of Julia Wedgwood: Imperfect Antithesis

This chapter looks at the antithesis of the natural and the supernatural, which is fundamental to Wedgwood’s thought. She maintains that nature is a self-contained and continuous order in which there can be no supernatural breaks, and yet that our power of free will is a supernatural ability to transcend natural determination and turn its flow in a new direction. Her ethics of self-sacrifice commits her to the latter view. She holds not only that normativity is irreducible but also that there is a supernatural realm, distinct from nature, which makes self-sacrifice possible. Nonetheless, her views seem in contradiction, which she tries to solve by arguing that there is a spiritual dimension in nature all along. Consequently, we do not interrupt nature when we act freely, because nature already contains spirit. However, this solves the interruption problem only by relinquishing her core claim that nature is self-contained. Having traced these problems, the chapter broadens out to Wedgwood’s wider view on the imperfect antithesis of natural and supernatural.

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).