The central focus of Peirce’s work is the development of self-control through engaging in a critical, reflective practice of habit development. This book details that development from a philosophical, pragmatic perspective.

Habit plays a central role in Peirce's pragmatic account of human signification. What he means by meaning is, hence, fully intelligible only in reference to the role he accords to habit in this account. While the main focus of Peirce's critical attention is, especially in the mature articulation of his thoroughgoing pragmatism, upon deliberately acquired habits, it is reasonable to suggest that often his concern is actually with something broader in one sense and narrower in another than individual (...) or isolated habits. Any given disposition to act in certain ways in certain circumstances is taken by him to be an integral part of more or less integrated dispositions to act, feel, and even imagine: it is not taken to be operative apart from these other habits. In this sense, then, his concern is primarily with such integrated dispositions, not isolated habits. Thus, it is broader than the inattentive reader is likely to suspect. But, since those deliberately cultivated dispositions of rational agents that are at the center of Peirce's concerns are ones specifiable only in reference to some human practice such as experimental inquiry or everyday conversations, religious worship or artistic innovation, these dispositions are appropriately taken to be not simply habits in any way whatsoever but primarily habits to act in a competent or expert manner. More simply put, these deliberately cultivated dispositions are, in many instances, best conceived as competencies or expertise. While not all habits equip agents with expert or even competent ways of addressing the shifting demands of experiential situations (that is, while not all habits are instances of competence or expertise), all cases of competence and expertise are, at bottom, more or less harmoniously integrated clusters of flexible, nuanced, and alterable habits. Accordingly, any account of Peirce's conception of habit, especially as it pertains to his pragmatic theory of meaning, must bring into sharper focus the complex relationship among habits, competence, and expertise than Peirce and even his most imaginative expositors have done thus far. The aim of this paper is to push our investigation of the Peircean notion of human habituation in precisely this direction. Against an evolutionary background, the historical foreground of historically evolved and evolving practices will be sketched. Habits in their guise as competencies and expertise will then be seen in the context of such practices, with equal emphasis on initiation into a practice and the open-ended process of acquiring ever more refined expertise. (shrink)

In the recent history of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, the notion of habit has been reduced to a stimulus-triggered response probability correlation. In this paper we use a computational model to present an alternative theoretical view (with some philosophical implications), where habits are seen as self-maintaining patterns of behavior that share properties in common with self-maintaining biological processes, and that inhabit a complex ecological context, including the presence and influence of other habits. Far from mechanical automatisms, this organismic and (...) self-organizing concept of habit can overcome the dominating atomistic and statistical conceptions, and the high temporal resolution effects of situatedness, embodiment and sensorimotor loops emerge as playing a more central, subtle and complex role in the organization of behavior. The model is based on a novel “iterant deformable sensorimotor medium” (IDSM), designed such that trajectories taken through sensorimotor-space increase the likelihood that in the future, similar trajectories will be taken. We couple the IDSM to sensors and motors of a simulated body and environment and show that under certain conditions, the IDSM forms self-maintaining patterns of activity that operate across the IDSM, the body, and the environment. We present various environments and the resulting habits that form in them. The model acts as an abstraction of habits at a much needed sensorimotor “meso-scale” between microscopic neuron-based models and macroscopic descriptions of behavior. Finally, we discuss how this model and extensions of it can help us understand aspects of behavioral self-organization, historicity and autonomy that remain out of the scope of contemporary representationalist frameworks. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis had a profound influence on formation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. However, at the same time, he rejects Freud’s idea that the unconscious consists of latent mental contents that cause a certain type of behavior. Instead of a hidden experience, Merleau-Ponty argues that the unconscious is an ambiguous consciousness. In The Structure of Behavior and The Phenomenology of Perception, he specifies this ambiguity by means of the concepts of habit, bad faith, bodily expression, affective intentionality and body schema. In this (...) paper, I will present the interconnection of these aspects of the human existence, following Merleau-Ponty’s two early major works. Further, I will show the difference of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of bad faith from that of Sartre, and, finally, I will suggest a limitation of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to the unconscious. (shrink)

For Aristotle, excellence is not an act but a habit, and Hume regards habit as ‘the great guide of life’. However, for Proust habit is problematic: ‘if habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our first.’ What is habit? Do habits turn us into machines or free us to do more creative things? Should religious faith be habitual? Does habit help or hinder the practice of philosophy? Why do Luther, Spinoza, Kant, (...) Kierkegaard and Bergson all criticise habit? If habit is both a blessing and a curse, how can we live well in our habits? In this thought-provoking book Clare Carlisle examines habit from a philosophical standpoint. Beginning with a lucid appraisal of habit’s philosophical history she suggests that both receptivity and resistance to change are basic principles of habit-formation. Carlisle shows how the philosophy of habit not only anticipates the discoveries of recent neuroscience but illuminates their ethical significance. She asks whether habit is a reliable form of knowledge by examining the contrasting interpretations of habitual thinking offered by Spinoza and Hume. She then turns to the role of habit in the good life, tracing Aristotle’s legacy through the ideas of Joseph Butler, Hegel, and Félix Ravaisson, and assessing the ambivalent attitudes to habit expressed by Nietzsche and Proust. She argues that a distinction between habit and practice helps to clarify this ambivalence, particularly in the context of habit and religion, where she examines both the theology of habit and the repetitions of religious life. She concludes by considering how philosophy itself is a practice of learning to live well with habit. (shrink)

The aim of my contribution is to investigate the ground of habits and rituals; they are based on the same processes even though they have different functions depending on the context (personal or social). My discussion will mostly centered on the nature and function of rituals, as necessary practices in human social life (but also in animal life). After a brief introduction of different perspectives on the notions of “habit” and “ritual”, I propose an interpretation of rituals as collective (...) activity, which is based on the same mechanisms of habits formation but it is expressed in a “we-form”, from which is created and institutionalized. (shrink)

Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and (...) enactive (4E) cognition. We review the enactive approach and highlight how it moves beyond the traditional stalemate by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns. Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. We identify a potential shortcoming of this enactive account with respect to bad habits, since self-maintenance of a habit would always be intrinsically good. Nevertheless, this is only a problem if, following the mainstream perspective on habits, we treat habits as isolated modules. The enactive approach replaces this atomism with a view of habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. Accordingly, we propose to define a bad habit as one whose expression, while positive for itself, significantly impairs a person’s well-being by overruling the expression of other situationally relevant habits. We end by considering implications of this concept of bad habit for psychological and psychiatric research, in particular with respect to addiction research. (shrink)

Despite a growing literature on environmental inaction, it remains poorly understood. This article examines much of this literature including environmental ethics, policy studies, disaster theory, and psychology. Among the many existing explanations, we examine shifting values, rational incentives, and psychological barriers to action. Ultimately, we show how most of these explanations rely on simplistic assumptions about subjectivity. To address this, we apply the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to show how an understanding of habit informed by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology reveals the (...) deeper conditions of both action and inaction. (shrink)

In this text, I discuss the role that a range of habits in affluent societies play in upholding as well as masking an unsustainable status quo. I show that enactivism, as a philosophical approach to the embodied and embedded mind, offers resources for bringing into focus and critically interrogating suchhabits of affluenceand the environments enabling them. I do this in the context of a critical theory ofthe unfelt in society: the systematic production of lacunae of emotive concern in social collectives. (...) The lack of proportionate affective and practical responses to the ecological crisis epitomizes this. The article starts with considerations on societal unfeeling, then reviews key elements of enactive approaches to habit, before a fuller picture of habits of affluence is developed, informed by Brand’s and Wissen’s concept of theimperial mode of living. Finally, two dimensions of habits of affluence are discussed in some detail, which will help flesh out a thematically expanded, politically engaged version of enactivism. (shrink)

Habits form a crucial part of the everyday conceptual scheme used to explain normal human activity. However, they have been neglected in debates concerning folk-psychology which have concentrated on propositional attitudes such as beliefs. But propositional attitudes are just one of the many mental states. In this paper, I seek to expand the debate by considering mental states other than propositional attitudes. I conclude that the case for the autonomy and plausibility of the folk-psychological explanation is strengthened when one considers (...) an example from the non-propositional-attitude mental states: habits. My main target is the radical eliminativist program. As regards habits, eliminativists could argue in two distinct but related ways. They can either abandon the concept "habit" altogether or retain the folk-psychological term "habit" by reducing it to the causal chain of the observed behavior pattern, as is sometimes done in social theory. I contend that both of these strategies are defective. The correct way to talk about habits is in terms of manifestations and activating conditions, not in terms of causal chains. Hence, if eliminativists take up either of the two arguments given above, they will not succeed. Correspondingly, by the added generality gained through the consideration of habits, the case for folk-psychology is strengthened. (shrink)

This paper shows how reflection on habit leads in nineteenth-century French philosophy to Henri Bergson’s idea of duration in 1888 as a non-quantifiable dimension irreducible to time as measured by clocks. Historically, I show how Albert Lemoine’s 1875 L’habitude et l’instinct was crucial, since he holds – in a way that is both Ravaissonian and Bergsonian avant la lettre – that for the being capable of habit, the three elements of time are fused together. For that habituated being, (...) Lemoine claims, it is not true to say that the past is no longer, nor even that the future is not yet. This historical link between Ravaisson and Bergson, however, only sharpens the philosophical question of how a dynamic conception of habit involves and requires a conception of real duration, of a temporality more original than clock-time, and, conversely, of how reflection on duration prior to clock-time involves a notion of habit. With reference to the work of Gilles Deleuze, the paper concludes by showing that there is an internal connection between these two grand philosophical themes of nineteenth- and then twentieth-century French thought: habit and time. (shrink)

This article explores the connection between habits and the performing arts, arguing that habits are not only fundamental to the practice and appreciation of these arts but also inherently performative in nature. Drawing on insights from various philosophical traditions (including cognitive science, pragmatism, and phenomenology), it examines how habits function within artistic processes as resources for creativity and adaptation. Engaging critically with Noë’s interpretation of the entanglement between art and life, this article highlights the dual nature of habits: as routine (...) practices that scaffold artistic expression and as dynamic, transformative elements responsive to specific cultural and performative contexts. By focusing on key notions such as gesture, style, and rituality in the performing arts, this article discusses the role of habits in aesthetic experiences, highlighting how habits shape both artistic performances and audience engagement. This perspective challenges traditional views that oppose habits to creativity, defending instead the idea that habits are creatively operative in both the performing arts and their reception. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that in his 1838 De l'habitude, Félix Ravaisson uses the analysis of habit to defend a Leibnizian monadism. Recent commentators have failed to appreciate this because they read Ravaisson as a typically post-Kantian philosopher, and underemphasize the distinct context in which he developed his work. I explore three key claims made by interpreters who argue that Ravaisson should be read as a Schellingian, and show [i] that these claims are incompatible with the text of (...) De l'habitude and [ii] how they have obscured from view the monadism at the heart of this work. This article is divided into two sections. First, I explain the importance of Victor Cousin and Maine de Biran for the development of nineteenth-century French philosophy. Second, I argue that to understand the structure of De l'habitude, it should be read as a critique of Cousin's philosophical method and a demonstration of the superiority of Biran's Leibniz-inspired introspective method. Like Biran, Ravaisson believes tha.. (shrink)

Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even mind and matter. Habit thus discloses a paradox. (...) It takes up a unique position in affect modulation, which encompasses both regulation (in the form of discipline) and also extends the body’s potential for engaging the new, change and creativity. In order to understand the basis of the ambivalent duality governing understandings of habit it is argued that a genealogical approach to this question is necessary. This will be located within the recent ‘turn to affect’ and histories of conation within the psychological sciences, particularly taking the writings of William McDougall as a focus. (shrink)

""The Habit of Lying" is a highly original, exceptionally sophisticated, continuously illuminating work of literary and cultural theory, and an intellectual ...

This article examines the issues that are at stake in the current resurgence of interest in the subject of habit. We focus on the role that habit has played in conceptions of the relations between body and society, and the respects in which such conceptions have been implicated in processes of governance. We argue that habit has typically constituted a point of leverage for regulatory practices that seek to effect some realignment of the relations between different components (...) of personhood – will, character, memory and instinct, for example – in order to bring about a specific end. In reviewing its functioning in this regard across a range of modern disciplines – philosophy, psychology, sociology – we explore the tensions between its use and interpretation in different lineages: in particular, the Cartesian–Kantian/ravaisson–bergson–deleuze lineages. The article then identifies how these questions are addressed across the contributions collected in this special issue. (shrink)

Dichotomous thinking about mental phenomena is abundant in philosophy. One particularly tenacious dichotomy is between “automatic” and “controlled” processes. In this characterization automatic and unintelligent go hand in hand, as do non-automatic and intelligent. Accounts of skillful action have problematized this dichotomous conceptualization and moved towards a more nuanced understanding of human agency. This binary thinking is, however, still abundant in the philosophy of joint action. Habits and skills allow us agentic ways of guiding complex action routines that would otherwise (...) overwhelm our reflective capacities. In this paper, I look at how theories of skill, habit, and know-how in individual action can inform a non-dichotomous account of joint action. I argue that a fuller understanding of joint agency has to understand not only group know-how, but also the role of attention and the highly integrated types of control that allow agents to act together. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is reasonable to make attributions about a leader’s character based on minor incidents such as kicking a dog. It begins with a short review of the relevant literature from leadership studies and social psychology on how our prototypes of leaders affect the attributions we make about them. Then the paper examines the role of virtues, habits, and dispositional statements to show why an act such as kicking a dog can offer insight into a leader’s moral (...) character. (shrink)

Habit has been understood, through the work of Descartes, Kant and Sartre, as a form of mechanism that arrests and inhibits consciousness, thought and freedom. This article addresses the concept of habit through a different tradition that links it instead to an ever-moving world. In a world of constant change, habits are not so much forms of fixity and repetition as they are modes of encounter materiality and life. Habit is the point of transition between living beings (...) and matter, enabling each to be transformed through its engagement with the other. The article focuses on the work of Ravaisson, Bergson and Deleuze, who understand habit as fundamentally creative and addressed to the future rather than consolidating the past. Habit, within this tradition, is the opening of materiality to the forms of engagement required by life, and the modification of life imposed by the requirements of a material universe. It is open-ended plasticity. (shrink)

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a (...) lifelong endeavor made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self ” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation. (shrink)

There has been an intellectual debate at least since the 1960s in business ethics on the role of the media in relation to consumer choice driven by either habits or rationality. If consumers are totally rational, then the global media and global corporations provide just information and knowledge. If consumers are influenced by habit then large corporations and global media can greatly influence consumer choice and create problems of self-control (Ainslie, 1992, Pico Economics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational (...) States Within the Person, Cambridge University press, Cambridge). In this article, we provide a synthesis and integrated approach to this continuing debate. We provide a more institutional approach to consumer choice based on social conventions, rather than just on individual habits and lapses in self-control. (shrink)

Habit and Embodiment in Merleau-PontyIntroductionMerleau-Ponty (French phenomenological philosopher, born in 1908 and deceased in 1961) refers to habit in various passages of his Phenomenology of Perception as a relevant issue in his philosophical and phenomenological position. Through his exploration of this issue he explains both the pre-reflexive character that our original linkage with the world has, as well as the kind of “understanding” that our body develops with regard to the world. These two characteristics of human existence bear (...) a close relation with the vision of an embodied mind sustained by Gallagher and Zahavi in their work The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Merleau-Ponty uses concepts like those of the lived or own body and of lived space in order to emphasize, from a first-person perspective, the co-penetration that exists between subject and world.Gallagher and Zahavi have regained the experience of phenomenology, especially that of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, to contribute to the development of the cognitive sciences. Via the phenomenological approach to the reality of habit, a new understanding of the body becomes possible for us, such that it becomes characterized “as subject, as experiencer, as agent”, and at the same time we can understand “the way the body structures our experience” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). Additionally, the idea of a pre-reflexive understanding is conceived of by these authors... (shrink)

I distinguish between 'hard nudges' and 'soft nudges', arguing that it is possible to show that the latter can be compatible with informed consent - as Cohen has recently suggested; but that the real challenge is the compatibility of the former. Hard nudges are the more effective nudges because they work on less than conscious mechanisms such as those underlying our habits: whether those influences - which are often beyond the subject's awareness - can be reconciled with informed consent in (...) health care is the more challenging question. I suggest two directions for possible answers: on the one hand, looking at the growing empirical literature on mindless judgement and behaviour; and on the other hand considering a more diversified conception of consent, which I sketch. (shrink)

Although pragmatism and phenomenology have both contributed significantly to the genealogy of so-called “4E” – embodied, embedded, enactive and extended – cognition, there is benefit to be had from a systematic comparative study of these roots. As existing 4E cognition literature has tended to emphasise one or the other tradition, issues remain to be addressed concerning their commonalities – and possible incompatibilities. We begin by exploring pragmatism and phenomenology’s shared focus on contesting intellectualism, and its key assumption of mindedness as (...) representation. We then outline distinctive insights from both traditions regarding the nature and role of habits, in order to put forward a habit-based epistemology as an alternative to the Cartesian idea-based epistemology that has dominated modern philosophy. We pay particular attention to the work of classical pragmatist C.S. Peirce, arguing that his semiotics, which analyses sign-use as habit, shows how theorists of embodied cognition can break a certain false dichotomy between embodiment and logical or intellectual structure which has prevented them from fully theorising propositional knowledge. In this way, our work both augments and challenges the Dewey/Merleau-Ponty connection that has been much more extensively explored by the field. (shrink)

Despite their obvious importance to social and political life, custom and customary law have largely escaped philosophical scrutiny. There are important recent philosophical analyses of convention, but none of custom. And customary law has been recently neglected by the dominant legal positivism. One reason for the neglect of custom is the familiar dichotomy between nature and convention. Social practices are said to be either by nature, and therefore assumed to be unalterable, or they are said to be by convention, and (...) therefore assumed to be created at will. But customs arise neither simply from nature nor from deliberate stipulation, so they are excluded by the familiar opposition of nature and convention. Custom is a notoriously vague concept: custom seems both to be natural and conventional. I attempt to show how custom bridges human nature and social norms. I argue that custom must be analyzed into two more logically basic concepts: habit and convention. Custom is a habitual convention and a conventional habit. I discuss habit and convention in relation to contemporary psychology and analytic philosophy. Habit roots custom in the physiology of human nature while convention links custom to social norms. Aristotle pioneered this approach to custom by using two words to describe what we call custom: ethos and nomos. Ethos focuses our attention on the habitual dimension of custom while nomos focuses our attention on the conventional dimension of custom. I argue that the function of law is to remedy the deficiencies of custom: law is custom’s instrument for shaping its own evolution. (shrink)

This article compares the concept of habitus, as formulated in the work of Mauss and Bourdieu, with the concept of habit, as formulated in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Dewey. The rationale for this, on one level, is to seek to clarify these concepts and any distinction that there may be between them – though the article notes the wide variety of uses of both concepts and suggests that these negate the possibility of any definitive definitions or contrasts. More (...) centrally, however, the purpose of the comparison is to draw out a number of important issues and debates which, it is argued, further work must address if the concepts of habit and habitus are to continue to prove useful and illuminating in social science. (shrink)

Recent discussions of Hegel's conception of second nature, specifically focused on Hegel's notion of habit (Gewohnheit), have greatly advanced our understanding of Hegel's views on embodied normativity. This essay examines Hegel's account of embodied normativity in relation to his assessment of good and bad habits. Engaging Hegel's account of the rabble (Pöbel) in thePhilosophy of Rightand Frank Ruda's assessment of Hegel's rabble, this essay traces the relation between ethicality, idleness and race in Hegel. In being a figure of refusal (...) in its affirmation of idleness, the rabble disallows the progressive revision of the project of modernity central to Hegel's philosophy. Hegel's discussion of the rabble is thus key to assessing the production of race within Hegel's notion of ethical life. (shrink)

The Habits of Racism examines some of the complex questions raised by the phenomenon and experience of racism. Helen Ngo argues that the conceptual reworking of habit as bodily orientation helps to identify the more subtle but fundamental workings of racism, exploring what the lived experience of racism and racialization teaches about the nature of the embodied and socially-situated being.

The opening words of the second book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics are as familiar as any in his corpus: Excellence of character results from habituation [ethos]—which is in fact the source of the name it has acquired [êthikê], the word for ‘character-trait’ [êthos] being a slight variation of that for ‘habituation’ [ethos]. This makes it quite clear that none of the excellences of character [êthikê aretê] comes about in us by nature; for no natural way of being is changed through (...) habituation [ethizetai]. Equally familiar, unfortunately, is the characterization of Aristotle’s notion of character formation as a form of habituation by means of the repetition of actions which results in a “habit” in the same way that a weight lifter produces muscles through the repetition of exertions. As a 19th century commentator remarked on the passage above, “[insert Grant].” From a Socratic perspective, such a view of becoming good seems hopelessly rigid and unconnected to the intellectual development which knowledge of the good requires. Habit and habituation in Aristotle seem eminently familiar and eminently unphilosophical. Such a view would be mistaken on at least three counts. First, the notion of character formation (to use the broadest possible term for the phenomenon of habituation) in Aristotle is significantly more complicated than the notion that through habituation one develops good habits which are what we mean by ethical virtue. Although character formation includes the development of proper emotional responses, such as taking pleasure in what is fine and being repulsed by what is shameful, it is equally concerned with cognitive development independent of the intellectual virtues. Second, although Aristotle’s terms for “ethics” (êthica), character-trait (êthos), and habituation (ethos, ethismos, or ethizetai) are linguistically and conceptually interrelated, his notion of “ethical state” (hexis) is both linguistically and conceptually quite distinct from the notion of “habit,” at least as we use that term today. As one Aristotle translator has put it, “A hexis is not only not the same thing as a habit, but is almost exactly its opposite.” For Aristotle, a hexis is a dynamic equilibrium which, although always productive of virtuous actions, is nonetheless the basis for being virtuous in varied circumstances. Thirdly, once Aristotle’s notion of a character state is retrieved from its false association with “habit” and repetitive habituation, one sees that its apparent divorce from practical reason is more a fixture of Aristotle’s analytical method and its connotations of inflexibility or fixedness are in fact antithetical to Aristotle’s description of ethical virtue. Rather than view ethical “character” in its Greek etymological sense as an indelibly fixed or engraved mark or stamp (charactêr) upon one’s soul, Aristotle’s notion of ethical character (êthos) or virtue (aretê) captures the notion of a virtuoso who is responsive in an excellent fashion to what reason perceives in particular and changing circumstances. (shrink)

This research examined some characteristics of the learning habits of students with special needs and those without them in programmes of short?term vocational education in five areas: motivation, learning and learning techniques, emotional, social and the area of self?evaluation. The research sample consisted of 140 students from different secondary schools. The Questionnaire on the Learning Habits of Adolescents was used for the purpose of the study. The differences between the means from individual learning habit scales, between the students with (...) special needs or without them, were discovered by one?way analysis of variance. Basic findings of empirical research emphasise that there exist statistically significant differences between the students with special needs and the students without special needs in four areas of learning habits. Among the findings causing concern in connection with learning habits, we would like to underscore the fact that students with special needs are perceived as less efficient at and less competent in coping with learning and work tasks. These students are not familiar with effective methods and strategies for successful learning, which leads to the feelings of frustration and helplessness in case of failure. In order to cultivate an effective and supportive educational environment for students with special needs, short?term vocational schools should develop learning/teaching models that provide a potentially powerful alternative to traditionally directed teaching approaches. (shrink)

This article examines how the phenomenological concept of habit can be productively deployed in the analysis of racism, in order to propose a reframing of the problem. Racism does not unfold primarily in the register of conscious thought or action, I argue, but more intimately and insidiously in the register of bodily habit. This claim, however, relies on a reading of habit as bodily orientation – or habituation – as developed by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception. (...) Drawing on his account, I turn to two salient dimensions of racist praxis which I argue are better understood through the frame of habit: bodily gesture or response, and racialized perception. Building on the analyses of contemporary critical race thinkers, I argue that racism is habitual insofar as it is embedded in bodily modes of responding to the presentation of racialized ‘others’ and in ‘sedimented’ modes of racialized seeing. However, this is not to suggest that the acquisition of racist habits is passive, or that such habits foreclose the possibility of change. In the final section, I revisit the concept of habit and its usual characterization as ‘sedimentation’ or ‘calcification’. I argue that while such a reading gives voice to the anchoring weight of the temporal past in habit, a more prospective rendering of the concept is available to us through a rereading of sedimentation as active passivity; habits are not only acquired, they are also held. This in turn will allow us to recast the question of responsibility in relation to one’s racist habits. (shrink)

Under the influence of a reading style that Avital Ronell has called “narcoanalysis,” this article performs a reading of addiction and humility through David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. Exploring both addiction and humility through the vector of habit, I argue that both habits indicate the non-self-sufficiency of a subject exposed to affection from outside. But while I position addiction alongside humility, both as habits, I also argue that humility parasitizes the totalizing logic of addictive habit. Neither identical (...) to nor simply the opposite of addiction, humility exploits addiction's structure of uncontrollable relationality. Even addiction depends on the affectability or rhetoricity of a subject always already exposed in language. Humility holds this rhetoricity open. (shrink)

In this discussion I shall argue that some fairly widely held views about human habits are mistaken. These misconceptions are important because of the pervasiveness of the habitual in human behavior and because it is the concept of habit that has served as the prototype of various conceptions of conditioned response which are used in psychological explanation. One major task of this analysis is to show that accounts in which actions are explained by reference to rules are not incompatible (...) with accounts in which the same behavior is seen as the product of habit. (shrink)

This outstanding collection offers a thorough and diverse philosophical exploration of habit from the classical period to the modern day. Essential reading for students and researchers in the history of philosophy, ethics, phenomenology, philosophy of action and pragmatism.

In this paper I explain how, for Spinoza, humans can acquire the “habit of virtue” from “fatal necessity” (Ep.58). Spinoza claims that no decision can be made without memory of the thing that one wants to do. However, his rejection of free will also implies that nobody can freely select what to remember. It seems that, as it is not in the power of an individual to freely choose what to remember and do, it is not possible to establish (...) a disposition towards virtuous behavior. To solve this puzzle, I focus on the way in which memory interacts with reason, in Spinoza’s system. I argue that this interaction allows the unfolding in time of reasoning processes. Reasoning can, in turn, be conceived as a kind of habit, which generates and sustains virtuous behavior. First, I clarify what the notion “habit of virtue” signifies for Spinoza. Then, I briefly review his account of memory. Next, I elucidate his conception of reason and its building blocks, “common notions.” On these grounds, I show how reason can be understood as an activity by which mnemonic associations are reconfigured. Finally, I point out how reason relies on memory to preserve itself in time, determining virtuous habits. (shrink)

Social psychologists have performed many well-known experiments demonstrating that experimental subjects will perform in ways that are normatively inconsistent even across very similar situations. Situationist social psychologists and philosophers have often interpreted these findings to imply that most people lack general moral dispositions. These situationists have argued that our moral dispositions are at best narrowly local traits; they often describe our moral characters as fragmented. In this paper, I offer an alternative hypothesis for the same experimental results. I argue that (...) these normative inconsistencies in behavior might well be produced by habit interference: experimental subjects err by over-generalizing dispositions formed in prior situations. I ground this alternative hypothesis in the long tradition of transfer of learning studies, which demonstrated that cognitive inconsistency was often the result of habit interference and, hence, overly generalized dispositions. I shall thus explore the analogy between moral and cognitive inconsistency to show why social psychology might well benefit from adopting the experimental design of the classic transfer of learning studies. (shrink)

in Jeremy McKenna (ed), At the Boundaries of Cricket, to be published in 2007 as a special issue of the journal Sport in Society and as a book in the series Sport in the Global Society (Taylor and Francis).

This volume explores the role of both “mere habits” and sophisticated habitus in the formation of moral character and the virtues, incorporating perspectives from philosophy, theology, psychology, and neuroscience.

Leadership research has grown into two opposing approaches, the scientific approach and the critical approach. The first is focused on leadership, the second on the leaders. For reasons of practicality, they will be described as the leadership-centric and the leader-centric approach, respectively. Each of the two approaches is characterised by two different perspectives: leadership-centric research highlights science and process; leader-centric research deals with the leader using cognitive faculties and drawing on cultural practices. This opposition has created an unproductive gap in (...) leadership scholarship. The present article focuses on how to reduce that gap by bridging some of the differences that currently undermine scholarship. The concept of habits is used to support an argument in favour of leadership as a social phenomenon. The main idea is that a social phenomenon involves both social interactions happening in everyday shared knowledge and intentionality that influences agents’ experiences. By borrowing from the pragmatist John Dewey, leadership is conceptualised as habits embedded in social life. Habits comprise the social sharing of experience and knowledge in a meaningful world. But it seems difficult, it is further argued, to elaborate on people’s intentionality through habits. To overcome this difficulty, Edmund Husserl’s notion of doxic-theoretical experience is used. Habits, it is concluded, help make leadership-centric research less anonymous, and doxic agency the leader’s intentionality more transparent. (shrink)

This book evaluates how the pragmatist notion of habit can influence current debates at the crossroads between philosophy, cognitive sciences, neurosciences, and social theory. It deals with the different aspects of the pragmatic turn involved in 4E cognitive science and traces back the roots of such a pragmatic turn to both classical and contemporary pragmatism. Written by renowned philosophers, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and social theorists, this volume fills the need for an interdisciplinary account of the role of 'habit'. (...) Researchers interested in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, social theory, and social ontology will need this book to fully understand the pragmatist turn in current research on mind, action and society. (shrink)

Philosophical views of habit were deeply influenced by Aristotle. If we understand habit in relation to hexis, to the acquired disposition to act in a certain way, then habit becomes a key phenomenon of ethics. According to the famous quotation, "It makes no small difference, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference."1 And yet we can understand habit also (...) as a dull and rigid mechanism, as something that moves us away from humanity, as we read in Immanuel Kant: "The reason for being disgusted with someone's acquired habits lies in the fact that the animal here predominates over the man."2 Is habit more an expression of our... (shrink)

This study focuses on investigating habits in perioperative nursing culture, which are often simply accepted and not normally considered or discussed. A hermeneutical approach was chosen as the means of understanding perioperative nurses' experiences of and reflections on operating theatre culture. Focus group discussions were used to collect data, which was analysed using hermeneutical text analysis. The results revealed three main categories of habits present in perioperative nursing culture: habits that promote ethical values (by temporary friendship with patients, showing respect (...) for each other, and spending time on reflection on ethics and caring); habits that hinder progress (by seeing the patient as a surgical case, not acknowledging colleagues, and not talking about ethics); and habits that set the cultural tone (the hidden power structure and achieving more in less time). (shrink)

Habits of Whiteness offers a new way to talk about race and racism by focusing on racial habits and how to change them. According to Terrance MacMullan, the concept of racial whiteness has undermined attempts to create a truly democratic society in the United States. By getting to the core of the racism that lives on in unrecognized habits, MacMullan argues clearly and charitably for white folk to recognize the distance between their color-blind ideals and their actual behavior. Revitalizing the (...) work of W. E. B. Du Bois and John Dewey, MacMullan shows how it is possible to reconstruct racial habits and close the gap between people. This forthright and persuasive analysis of the impulses of whiteness ultimately reorganizes them into something more compatible with our country's increasingly multicultural heritage. (shrink)

In contrast to the fairly entrenched interpretation of Pascal as a fideist who repudiates reason, and perhaps even ethics, in order to render religious faith the only viable option, this essay argues that an ethics of thought or belief pervades Pascal’s apology for the Christian faith. The ethics of thought is a topic much neglected among Pascal’s commentators but of great interest to contemporary virtue epistemologists and philosophers of religion. The central themes in Pascal’s ethics of thought emerge partly from (...) his confrontation with Descartes’s conception of human inquiry, in response to which Pascal forges his own conception of the ethics of thought, an ethics grounded in the inclinations and habits of the human heart. It turns out, moreover, that the standard objections against Pascal’s account of human reason repose upon a selective reading of texts and a failure to grasp Pascal’s dialectical method. Locating particular passages within the context of Pascal’s rich conception of the human condition, this essay evinces the many ways in which Pascal links knowledge to virtuous dispositions and thus develops an ethics of thought, at the pinnacle of which resides the vision of charity. (shrink)

In Treatise 1.4.2, David Hume seeks to explain how we come to believe in the external existence of bodies. He offers a complicated psychological account, where the imagination operates on the raw data of the senses to produce the ‘vulgar’ belief in the continued existence of the very things we sense. On behalf of philosophers, he presents a perceptual relativity argument that purports to show that the vulgar belief is false. I argue that scholars have failed to appreciate Hume's peculiar (...) formulation of the perceptual relativity argument and its relation to his psychological account of the vulgar belief. On my interpretation, in order to account for all the premises that Hume explicitly offers, the argument is best interpreted as beginning with a reductio that opposes the effects of the senses and the imagination in the vulgar belief. Thus Hume can be interpreted as identifying an ‘antinomy’ in the habits of the vulgar mind that produce belief in bodies. (shrink)

Many pragmatist and non-representational approaches to cognition, such as the enactivist, have focused on the relations between actions, affectivity, and habits from an intersubjective perspective. For those adopting such approaches, all these aspects are inextricably connected; however, many questions remain open regarding the dynamics by which they unfold and shape each other over time. This paper addresses a specific topic that has not received much attention: the impact on future behavior of not fulfilling possibilities for social interaction even though their (...) fulfillment is desirable within a given context. Inspired by Gibson’s theory of affordances and Dewey’s account of habits, these situations will be characterized as events where an agent does not act upon an inviting affordance for social interaction due to a conflict which he or she experiences between given concerns, needs, and social norms. This conflict leads to a sense of unfulfillment that may eventually bring about a crisis and revision of habits. Through specific examples, this work presents the potential impact of the connection between affordances, habits, and affectivity on everyday situations. It therefore represents an exploration of the common ground between pragmatism and enactivism and an attempt to contribute to a process-based approach to social interaction. (shrink)