a cura di M. Piazza e S. Sandreschi de Robertis, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2025, pp. 191.
The volume contains four essays representative of the philosophies of habit developed in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. The collection opens with Habit by Albert Lemoine (1869), which, in the wake of Maine de Biran and Ravaisson, proposes an innovative theory of the relationship between habit and repetition. This is followed by The Birth of Habits by Victor Egger (1880), in which Lemoine’s student seeks to refine his teacher’s theory by introducing an analysis of the role of the unconscious in the genesis of habit. The second pair of texts consists of two articles published in 1876. Léon Dumont, in Habit, extends—following Comte—the phenomenon of habit to the inorganic realm and conceives of human beings as the site of a permanent conflict between habits. For his part, Charles Renouvier, in Habit and Revolutions, describes the vicious circle of habit, which can be broken only through the transformative commitment of a secular and republican philosophy.
Volume published with the support of the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts of Roma Tre University, through funds from the PRIN PNRR 2022 research project “Transforming Habits. Agency, Cognition, and Social Change”, financed by the European Union – NextGenerationEU. CUP: F53D23010640001
