Copyright

Alison Stone

Published On

2026-07-16

Language

  • English

Print Length

8 pages

THEMA

  • QDTQ
  • QD
  • QDTJ
  • JPA
  • JH

BISAC

  • PHI005000
  • PHI019000
  • PHI009000
  • PHI022000
  • POL028000

Keywords

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

8. Wedgwood and Hegel

Chapter of: The Philosophy of Julia Wedgwood: Imperfect Antithesis

This chapter returns to Wedgwood’s relations with Hegel, to bring out the distinctive structure of her philosophy of imperfect antithesis, in contrast to Hegel’s system. The chapter first revisits her early review-essay on Hegel and her criticisms of Hegel’s excessive abstraction and systematicity. Then I ask whether, in fact, she puts forward a system herself. I propose that imperfect antithesis works differently, in an anti-systematic way that attends to lived experience and the heterogeneity of reality. From that perspective, I expand on Wedgwood’s anti-Hegelianism. Despite sharing his preoccupation with antithesis, she ultimately goes in a different direction. Imperfect antithesis is an organising lens, not a principle from which various antitheses can be deduced. The lens is meant to magnify the many variations within the real world, to guide close observation and be enriched by it. With its help, Wedgwood have us resist the simplifications of the logical intellect, which she believes Hegel ultimately fails to escape.

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).