Copyright
Alison StonePublished On
2026-07-16Language
- English
Print Length
16 pagesTHEMA
- QDTQ
- QD
- QDTJ
- JPA
- JH
BISAC
- PHI005000
- PHI019000
- PHI009000
- PHI022000
- POL028000
Keywords
- Victorian philosophy
- Ethics
- Metaphysics
- Religion
- History
- Feminism
10. Science and Faith
This chapter asks why Wedgwood laid growing stress on imperfect antithesis in its historical aspect as the law of recoil. The key motivation was her anxiety about scientific naturalism, which embodied science’s historical recoil against faith. Against naturalism, Wedgwood insists on supernatural phenomena, including heaven and the survival of the soul after death. How can we know about these supernatural phenomena? For her, our first-person experience gives immediate certainty of some supernatural realities, such as the self and free will, while others such as God are the object of belief and doubt. This brings us to her imperfect antitheses in the epistemic domain: belief and doubt, knowledge and denial, truth and falsehood. She contrasts them to the perfect antithesis fundamental to science: truth and ignorance. This brings us back to her wider worries about the rising naturalistic tide: it is erasing our moral experience of pursuing supernatural ideals, making free choices, feeling guilt and remorse, falling short of our ideals and trying harder. However, I argue that she opposes naturalism from what seem two conflicting directions: phenomenological and historical. A key question is how they fit together.
Contributors
Alison Stone
(author)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).