From bookshelves overflowing with self-help books to scholarly treatises on neurobiology to late-night infomercials that promise to make you happier, healthier, and smarter with the acquisition of just a few simple practices, the discourse of habit is a staple of contemporary culture high and low. Discussion of habit, however, tends to neglect the most fundamental questions: What is habit? Habits, we say, are hard to break. But what does it mean to break a habit? Where and how do habits take root in us? Do only humans acquire habits? What accounts for the strength or weakness of a habit? Are habits something possessed or something that possesses? We spend a lot of time thinking about our habits, but rarely do we think deeply about the nature of habit itself. Aristotle and the ancient Greeks recognized the importance of habit for the constitution of character, while readers of David Hume or American pragmatists like C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey know that habit is a central component in the conceptual framework of many key figures in the history of philosophy. Less familiar are the disparate discussions of habit found in the Roman Stoics, Thomas Aquinas, Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, Gilles Deleuze, French phenomenology, and contemporary Anglo-American philosophies of embodiment, race, and gender, among many others. The essays gathered in this book demonstrate that the philosophy of habit is not confined to the work of just a handful of thinkers, but traverses the entire history of Western philosophy and continues to thrive in contemporary theory. A History of Habit: From Aristotle to Bourdieu is the first of its kind to document the richness and diversity of this history. It demonstrates the breadth, flexibility, and explanatory power of the concept of habit as well as its enduring significance. It makes the case for habit’s perennial attraction for philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists.

For Aristotle, habit was a fundamental aspect of human nature; and for William James, it was the "enormous flywheel" of society. In both the history of philosophy and contemporary research, it is acknowledged as a fundamental topic in ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of action, and phenomenology. This major volume, written by a team of international contributors, is an outstanding collection that offers a thorough and diverse philosophical exploration of habit from the classical period to the modern day. Carefully edited to reflect the breadth of the subject, its 18 chapters are divided into four clear parts: Habit and Ancient Philosophy Habit and Early Modern Philosophy Habit and Modern Philosophy Contemporary Perspectives on Habit. Key topics, debates, and figures are covered such as the emotions, perception, free will, William James, John Dewey, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John McDowell, and Hubert Dreyfus. Habit and the History of Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in the history of philosophy, ethics, phenomenology, philosophy of action, and pragmatism. It will also be extremely useful for those in related disciplines such as religion, sociology, and history.

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.

This book constitutes the first treatment of C. S. Peirce’s unique concept of habit. Habit animated the pragmatists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who picked up the baton from classical scholars, principally Aristotle. Most prominent among the pragmatists thereafter is Charles Sanders Peirce. In our vernacular, habit connotes a pattern of conduct. Nonetheless, Peirce’s concept transcends application to mere regularity or to human conduct; it extends into natural and social phenomena, making cohesive inner and outer worlds. Chapters in this anthology define and amplify Peircean habit; as such, they highlight the dialectic between doubt and belief. Doubt destabilizes habit, leaving open the possibility for new beliefs in the form of habit-change; and without habit-change, the regularity would fall short of habit – conforming to automatic/mechanistic systems. This treatment of habit showcases how, through human agency, innovative regularities of behavior and thought advance the process of making the unconscious conscious. The latter materializes when affordances (invariant habits of physical phenomena) form the basis for modifications in action schemas and modes of reasoning. Further, the book charts how indexical signs in language and action are pivotal in establishing attentional patterns; and how these habits accommodate novel orientations within event templates. It is intended for those interested in Peirce’s metaphysic or semiotic, including both senior scholars and students of philosophy and religion, psychology, sociology and anthropology, as well as mathematics, and the natural sciences.

AUTHORITATIVE AND ACCESSIBLE, THIS LANDMARK WORK IS THE FIRST SINGLE-VOLUME HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY SHARED FOR DECADES 'A cerebrally enjoyable survey, written with great clarity and touches of wit' Sunday Times The story of philosophy is an epic tale: an exploration of the ideas, views and teachings of some of the most creative minds known to humanity. But there has been no comprehensive history of this great intellectual journey since 1945. Intelligible for students and eye-opening for philosophy readers, A. C. Grayling covers with characteristic clarity and elegance subjects like epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, logic, and the philosophy of mind, as well as the history of debates in these areas, through the ideas of celebrated philosophers as well as less well-known influential thinkers. The History of Philosophy takes the reader on a journey from the age of the Buddha, Confucius and Socrates. Through Christianity's dominance of the European mind to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. On to Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre, then the philosophical traditions of India, China and the Persian-Arabic world. And finally, into philosophy today.

Of all the topics in the history of philosophy, the history of different forms of thinking and contemplation is one of the most important, and yet is also relatively overlooked. What is it to think philosophically? How did different forms of thinking—reflection, contemplation, critique and analysis—emerge in different epochs? This collection offers a rich and diverse philosophical exploration of the history of contemplation, from the classical period to the twenty-first century. It covers canonical figures including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, as well as debates in less well-known areas such as classical Indian and Islamic thought and the role of speculation in twentieth-century Russian philosophy. Comprising twenty-two chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into five parts: • Flourishing and Thinking from Homer to Hume • The Thinking of Thinking from Augustine to Gödel • Images and Thinking from Plotinus to Unger • Bodies of Thought and Habits of Thinking from Plato to Irigaray • The Efficacy of Thinking from Sextus to Bataille Thought: A Philosophical History is the first comprehensive investigation of the history of philosophical thought and contemplation. As such, it is a landmark publication for anyone researching and teaching the history of philosophy, and a valuable resource for those studying the subject in related fields such as literature, religion, sociology and the history of ideas.