The Vital Habit in Kant's Philosophy (original) (raw)
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Habitual Desire: On Kant's Concept of Inclination
Tamar Schapiro has offered an important new 'Kantian' account of inclination and motivation, one that expands and refines Christine Korsgaard's view. In this essay I argue that Kant's own view differs significantly from Schapiro's. Above all, Kant thinks of inclinations as dispositions, not occurrent desires; and he does not believe that they stem directly from a non-rational source, as she argues. Schapiro's 'Kantian' view rests on a much sharper distinction between the rational and non-rational parts of the soul. In the process of explaining these (and other) differences, I argue that Kant's own in view is in some respects philosophically superior to Schapiro's.
Habit and the Limits of the Autonomous Subject, Body and Society, 2013
After briefly describing the history and significance of the nature-reason dualism for philosophy this paper examines why much of the Kantian inspired examination of norms and ethics continues to appeal to this division. It is argued that much of what is claimed to be rationally legitimated norms can, at least in part, be understood as binding on actions and beliefs, not because they are rationally legitimated, but because they are habituated. Drawing on Hegel's discussion of ethical life and habit it is argued that human subjects identify through self-feeling, not reason, most practices and norms as their own. It is on this basis that norms are taken not just as the basis for action but are constitutive of human identity, an identity that is spiritual, embodied and affective. While habit is central to the way Hegel reconfigures ethics and norms as well as the distinct model of freedom that he develops in his social and political thought, habit, it will be argued, has its limits as a model for human freedom, limits
Theologies of Habit: From Hexis to Plasticity
Body & Society, 2013
This article examines medieval and early modern theologies of habit (those of Augustine, Aquinas and Luther), and traces a theme of appropriation through the discourse on habit and grace. It is argued that the question of habit is central to theological debates about human freedom, and about the nature of the Godrelationship. Continuities are then highlighted with modern philosophical accounts of habit, in particular those of Ravaisson and Hegel. The article ends by considering some of the philosophical and political implications of the preceding analysis of habit.
A History of Habit: From Aristode to Bourdieu
Accordingly, I take the volume at hand as a landmark achievement in its field. If it is taken as such, it deserves to be evaluated by stringent criteria. If such criteria are applied, a few observations should be made. All fifteen contributions in the book, bar two, explicitly mention the pragmatist tradition of philosophy and Mead's membership in it. However, not one of the contributions makes any analytic use of the following pragmatist principles that are central in Mead's thought as well: (l) A fallibilistic basic conception of human action, resulting in (2) a replacement of theory of knowledge by a theory ofinquiry. Further consequences of the above suppositions are more indirect, but just as important: (3) a new conception of meaning, by which meaning is understood (3a) from the logical point of view as constituted by triadic relations and (3b) from an empirically descriptive point of view as a phenomenon that widely transcends the human mind and human language , a phenomenon "almost coextensive with life" as Mead once put it. Accordingly, there is still some further work to be done in showing how timeless a thinker Mead really was (and is) and how his thought has firm roots in a unique tradition. This task has become much easier thanks to the contribution of the present volume. Lanham, Lexington, 2013, xi + 315, incl. index. The collection by Sparrow and Hutchinson gathers together (mostly) philosophers and (a few) sociologists to discuss the ever fascinating yet surprisingly underplayed theme of habit: its history and place in the western philosophical tradition, from the ancients to the contemporary scene. A collection such as this has been long overdue, and surprisingly so, given the centrality of habits in our understanding and organization of ourselves and of the world. We human beings are in fact complex bundles of habits embodied in practices. Hence, our limits and possibilities are at least partially governed by the way in which we habitu-ate, dishabituate, and re-habituate ourselves. Although their presence is widely acknowledged, what such bundles of habits are and even more interestingly what we can make of them (and of ourselves through them)
The Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2017
Analysis of the concept of habit has been relatively neglected in the contemporary analytic literature. This paper is an attempt to rectify this lack. The strategy begins with a description of some paradigm cases of habit which are used to derive five features as a basis for an explicative definition. It is argued that habits are social, acquired through repetition, enduring, environmentally activated, and automatic. The enduring nature of habits is captured by their being dispositions of a certain sort. This is a realist account of habits in so far as the dispositions put forward must fit with some recognizable underlying system-in the case of humans a biological system-to fill the role as set out by the definition. This role is wide-ranging; in addition to the familiar cases of habitual behavior, habitual activities also include thinking, perceiving, feeling and willing.
Kant-Studien, 2012
The article provides an introduction to an autograph draft of a letter on dietetics Kant wrote to the physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland and uses it as a springboard for the critical discussion of Kant's dietetics as well as its systematic place in his philosophy. The final draft of Kant's letter to Hufeland became the third part of The Conflict of the Faculties. The article argues that Kant (1) assigns dietetics, understood as the regulation of the traditional nonnaturals, to philosophy and not to medicine; (2) that he regards moral health as the basis for physical health; and (3) that his view of the systematic place of dietetics in his philosophy is inconsistent.
International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2020
Accounts of habit in ethics face a problem: habits make agency seem absurd-'ridiculous' to use Kant's word-yet habits are indispensable to diachronically based rational control of virtuous behavior, and to character. The apparent absurdity of habit is evident from the way in which habit-based behavior sidelines moral self-knowledge, obscuring what is good about an action (including the rational content of its doing) from the person engaged in it. On the other hand, morally reliable agents must answer to a counterfactual condition-the possession of moral character depends on the possession of dispositions to act well in varying circumstances. Moreover, moral development, in which proto-habits mold the agent appropriately generating a fluency of effectiveness, would appear to do so correlated with dulling of the moral senses in respect to the very thing the habit is supposed to improve. The tension between absurdity and indispensability arises in the analysis partly because certain usages of the English word 'habit' connote a shallow, mechanistic automaticity, in which agents are seen to be bound through "force of habit". However, a more sophisticated moral psychology from the neo-Aristotelean tradition places habit firmly within the orbit of rationality. On this conception reason and habit may cohabit, leading to habitus, a state of an agent shaped by habit and disposed towards reason.
Wittgenstein on Habit and Custom: A Conceptual Analysis
Argumenta, 2024
This paper presents a conceptual analysis of Wittgenstein's use of the notions of habit and custom. References to habit and custom abound in Wittgenstein's writings already from the 1930s, but no particular focus has been placed on his actual use of these notions. The aim of the paper is to provide a preliminary conceptual tool useful for developing a fruitful engagement between Wittgenstein's "posttractarian" philosophy and contributions to the philosophy of habit. To do this, I will first trace relevant occurrences in Wittgenstein's writings. Secondly, I will map the use of these concepts by identifying three related families of German expressions: Gepflogenheit, Gewohnheit and Gebrauch/Sitte. Finally, I will present three philosophical contexts in which the two notions play an important role: 1. remarks on rule-following; 2. imaginary cases; 3. meta-philosophical remarks on philosophical problems. I will conclude that Wittgenstein's reference to habit and custom is an important element of his anthropological or pragmatic turn.