Being Inclined is the first book-length study in English of the work of Felix Ravaisson, France's most influential philosopher in the second half of the nineteenth century. Mark Sinclair shows how Ravaisson, in his great work Of Habit, understands habit as tendency and inclination in away that provides the basis for a philosophy of nature and a general metaphysics. In examining Ravaisson's ideas against the background of the history of philosophy, and in the light of later developments (...) in French thought, Sinclair shows how Ravaisson gives an original account of the nature ofhabit as inclination, within a metaphysical framework quite different to those of his predecessors in the philosophical tradition.Being Inclined sheds new light on the history of modern French philosophy and argues for the importance of the neglected nineteenth-century French spiritualist tradition. It also shows that Ravaisson's philosophy of inclination, of being-inclined, is of great import for contemporary philosophy, andparticularly for the contemporary metaphysics of powers given that ideas about tendency have recently come to prominence in discussions concerning dispositions, laws, and the nature of causation. Being Inclined therefore offers a detailed and faithful contextualist study of Ravaisson's masterpiece,demonstrating its continued importance for contemporary thought. (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)

This reader makes the key essays of 19th century French philosopher Félix Ravaisson available in English for the first time. In recent years, Ravaisson has emerged as an extremely important and influential figure in the history of modern European philosophy. The volume contains the classic 1838 dissertation Of Habit, studies of Pascal, Stoicism and the wider history of philosophy together with the Philosophical Testament that he left unfinished when he died in 1900. The volume also features Ravaisson's (...) work in archaeology, the history of religions and art-theory, and his essay on the Venus de Milo, which occupied him over a period of twenty years after he noticed, when hiding the statue behind a false wall in a dingy Parisian basement during the Franco-Prussian war, that it had previously been presented in a way that deformed its original bearing and meaning. Félix Ravaisson: Selected Essays contains an introductory intellectual biography of Ravaisson, which contextualises each of the essays in the volume. It also features an annotated bibliography of suggested further reading. This book will grant scholars and students alike wider access to his distinctive contribution to the history of philosophy. (shrink)

This paper examines Flix Ravaisson's account of habit, as presented in his 1838 essay _Of Habit_, and considers its significance in the context of moral practice. This discussion is set in an historical context by drawing attention to the different evaluations of habit in Aristotelian and Kantian philosophies, and it is argued that Kant's hostility to habit is based on the dichotomy between mind and body, and freedom and necessity, that pervades his thought. (...) Ravaisson argues that the phenomenon of habit challenges these dualisms, and at least in this respect anticipates the discussions of habit in the work of twentieth-century phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur.

The paper outlines Ravaisson's account of habit in general, showing how his analysis of the “double law” of habit develops from the work of Maine de Biran, and highlighting the way in which Ravaisson offers a new and original philosophical interpretation of the phenomena of habit. Whereas Maine de Biran remains within a dualistic framework, and finds that habit is problematic within this framework, Ravaisson uses habit to demonstrate continuity between mind and body, will and nature. Then the focus is narrowed to consider how this analysis of habit is applied to a specifically moral context, and how it illuminates traditional Aristotelian theories of virtue. The paper ends by considering several practical consequences of the foregoing discussion of habit and the moral life. (shrink)

Félix Ravaisson's French Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century is one of the most influential and pivotal texts of modern French thought. Commissioned by the Minister of Public Instruction as one of a series of reports to record the progress of the French sciences and humanities for Paris' second world fair, the 1867 Exposition universelle d'arts et d'industrie, it was published with the others the following year. In the report Ravaisson argues, with verve and generosity, and with an unparalleled (...) command of the century's intellectual developments, that the myriad voices in nineteenth-century French thinking were beginning to form a chorus, one that was advancing towards a new, more concrete form of spiritualist philosophy able to resist materialist, mechanist and sensualist doctrines while incorporating recent developments in the life-sciences. As Henri Bergson noted, it effected a "profound change of orientation in university philosophy" and for decades afterwards students learnt its concluding sections by heart in order to pass public examinations. Bergson's own Creative Evolution, which made him the world's most celebrated living philosopher at the end of the long nineteenth century, is, with its psychological interpretation of biological evolution, a direct expression of the new philosophical orientation that Ravaisson had divined in the report. (shrink)

Volume 28, Issue 5, September 2020, Page 966-986.

Being Inclined is erudite, clearly written, and well-argued. It is rich in the history of philosophy and in philosophical ideas. It is not an exaggeration when Sinclair says that “philosophy advances, and can only advance, by means of a living dialogue with the past”. This short review cannot do the book justice.Being Inclined is divided into six chapters. From a historical viewpoint, chapters 1 and 2 are revelatory for the Anglophone reader of the last two hundred years of French philosophy. (...) Sinclair is a master at assembling all the texts that influenced Ravaisson and all the texts on which he had an influence. However, in the first two chapters, Sinclair also presents the basics of Ravaisson’s philosophy... (shrink)

L'Essai sur la Métaphysique d'Aristote fut composé à partir de 1834 et eut pour occasion une question de concours lancée par l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Il s'agissait de faire connaître l'énigmatique et glorieux chef-d'œuvre aristotélicien, la Métaphysique, d'en exposer la pensée, d'en faire l'histoire, d'en discuter la portée et les thèses. C'est un tout jeune homme, Félix Ravaisson (1813-1900), qui allait remporter le prix de l'Académie en 1835, à vingt-deux ans, et qui allait publier quelques mois plus (...) tard, en 1837, dans un premier volume, cet extraordinaire mémoire, qu'un second tome viendra compléter en 1845. La valeur de l'Essai sur la Métaphysique d'Aristote est inestimable, et c'est pourquoi sa réimpression était urgente. Hormis la grandiose lecture d'Aristote qu'il propose et dont la très élégante clarté sera sans nul doute appréciée de chaque personne désirant découvrir ou approfondir la connaissance de cette pensée fondamentale et fondatrice, cet ouvrage est une oeuvre d'art dans un domaine où l'on ne s'y attend pas ou plus, celui du commentaire philosophique. Et il ne serait pas trop audacieux de voir dans l'Essai sur la Métaphysique d'Aristote l'acte inaugural de cette grande tradition de restitution où, chacun se faisant pleinement connivent de l'auteur qu'il se choisit, fait également oeuvre d'écrivain en se mettant au service d'une expression privilégiée de la pensée : là où la pensée s'est faite somptueuse, ici en Aristote, l'exposition de celle-ci, en en rendant la cohérence, ne doit pas l'être moins. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to an unexplored subject in the history of spiritualism in the 19th century and considers two of its prominent representatives – the famous French spiritualist Felix Ravais­son (1813–1900) and the Swiss thinker Charles Secrétan (1815–1895). The author uses not only biographical material, but also such unstudied documents as Secretan’s article on the philosophy of Ravaisson and his letter to him, accidentally discovered by Ch. Devivaise in Ch. Renouvier’s archive. The author shows that the dependence of (...) both philosophers on Schelling was not so much the direct influence of the German philosopher on their thought as an internal relationship with his thought. The article shows that Ravaisson’s emphasis on the aesthetic component of understanding the world as the self-development of the spirit contrasts with the moral optics of Secrétan’s meta­physics. In addition, the philosophy of Ravaisson was formed on the basis of the Christianly rethought metaphysics of Aristotle, while the philosophy of Secrétan has as its starting point the moral and religious thought of Kant. However, the pathos of the universal striving for the best, the highest, the excellent on the path of sacrificial service and self-giving indissolubly unites these spiritualist philosophers. In the Appendix to the article, the author gives a translation of the men­tioned letter of Secrétan to Ravaisson. (shrink)

In Ravaisson’s philosophy, the concept of spontaneity refers to the first, basic and organic form of improvisation. Nature consists in fact of a rational law of development named habit, that regulates all movements, summarizing the external impulsions and the internal penchants in the form of spontaneous activity. However the insertion of spontaneity in nature determines the appearance of unpredictability and negativity in life’s productions, like organic and psychical pathologies. Ravaisson will try to show how this morbid spontaneity belongs (...) to nature’s rationality. (shrink)

Of the many literary forms philosophy has taken, the survey is undoubtedly among the least likely to elicit excitement. Understood as the enumeration and summary of a series of positions, one could...

Félix Ravaisson est l’instituteur d’une nouvelle conception de la métaphysique : le spiritualisme. À travers une confrontation critique serrée avec Victor Cousin, il a réalisé une synthèse inédite de l’histoire de la philosophie antique et moderne, fondée sur l’idée de l’individualité et sur la nature surabondante de l’être. Opposée à tout phénoménisme et néocriticisme, cette nouvelle métaphysique profite de la leçon schellingienne et élève Pierre Maine de Biran au statut de refondateur de la philosophie contemporaine. De Jules Lachelier à (...) Émile Boutroux jusqu’à Henri Bergson, une tendance majeure de la philosophie française sera obligée de reconnaître sa dette envers la pensée de Ravaisson, véritable explorateur spiritualiste du « champ abandonné de la métaphysique ». (shrink)

On se propose de montrer comment, entre la fin du xix e siècle et la première moitié du xx e siècle, une partie de l’esthétique française a été dominée par une esthétique de la force et du mouvement. Pour ce faire, on suit le fil conducteur de la ligne serpentine, notion que Félix Ravaisson emprunte à Léonard de Vinci et à Michel-Ange, et qu’il comprend comme une « ligne métaphysique », qui n’est pas un contour, mais structure les mouvements (...) des êtres vivants. Elle est l’analogue, par la simplicité et la continuité de son tracé, en même temps que par les différences qu’elle rencontre, du travail de l’âme et de la nature sur la matière. On montre ensuite comment cette notion a été réinvestie, à travers Bergson, par Merleau-Ponty, qui voit dans les inflexions de la ligne autant d’écarts qui font surgir le sens du temps. (shrink)

Félix Ravaisson est un philosophe qui fut à l’écoute des arts. Ce point n’est pas anecdotique. On cherche ici à mettre au jour ce qui, dans le cheminement de la pensée de Ravaisson, l’a poussé à interroger la pratique artistique, et au premier chef le dessin. Notre hypothèse est que l’art est, avec l’habitude, peut-être même mieux que l’habitude, la voie d’accès à l’essence de l’Être qui éconduit définitivement la représentation.

This essay will provide a comparative analysis of themes at work in both Jacques Derrida and Félix Ravaisson. By putting these thinkers in dialogue will I believe offers valuable insights into questions of deconstruction and vitalism. I will examine Derrida’s remarks on Ravaisson in On Touching: Jean Luc Nancy, and use his thoughts as a way of explaining the similarities and differences between Derrida and Ravaisson and thus of Derrida’s proximity to and distance from the vitalist tradition. (...) I will also be able to demonstrate the conceptual requirements and conditions for thinking how deconstruction operates, casting light on the ways in which deconstruction offers the conceptual resources to think a general theory of bodies and identities. (shrink)

This study investigates Félix RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix’s ambiguous relation to F. W. J. Schelling by homing in on the specific relation that holds between habit as a means of demonstrating an underlying identity of mind and world in RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix’s De l’habitude and Schelling’s use of aesthetic intuitionIntuition as a philosophical method in his 1800 System of Transcendental IdealismIdealism (also German Idealism). I argue that what Schelling found in fine art—the work of genius—RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix finds in habit, and from this conclude (...) that RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix offers what we might describe as a romantic conception of habit that brings it into the domain of the pre-rational, pre-reflective spontaneity that Schelling describes in artistic production. (shrink)

This study addresses the conceptual affinities between F. W. J. Schelling and Félix RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix by focusing on the genesis of the link between nature and thought in their respective philosophies. To achieve this, it considers the role of diagrammatic representation in depicting this link—particularly in the figure of the spiral. I argue that, for Schelling, the spiral is a real pattern that suggests the polarity of the mental and the physical whereas, for RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix, it is a memory of (...) the condition of action and a condition of grace. I cash out this argument by considering not only Schelling’s philosophy of nature, where the spiral is manifest in the vortex of the First Outline of the System of the Philosophy of Nature, and RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix’s OfHabitHabit, but also RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix’s essays on fine art, Leonardo da Vinci and the serpentine line. (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)

is it possible to have a first-person experience of our own agency? In nineteenth-century France, this question was subject to intense philosophical debate. The two figures primarily associated with each side of the debate were Maine de Biran and Charles Renouvier. Biran developed powerful objections to Hume's arguments that purported to prove the impossibility of the experience of one's inner causal force. These objections were the match that lit this philosophical fire, and formed the foundation of the philosophy of the (...) French spiritualist school; a school that included Félix Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier, Émile Boutroux, and Henri Bergson.1... (shrink)

Using the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy as an anchoring point, Jacques Derrida in this book conducts a profound review of the philosophy of the sense of touch, from Plato and Aristotle to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose ground-breaking book _Corpus_ he discusses in detail. Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Didier Franck, Martin Heidegger, Francoise Dastur, and Jean-Louis Chrétien are discussed, as are René Descartes, Diderot, Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, and others. The scope of Derrida's deliberations (...) makes this book a virtual encyclopedia of the philosophy of touch. Derrida gives special consideration to the thinking of touch in Christianity and, in discussing Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "Deconstruction of Christianity," devotes a section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels. Another section concentrates on "the flesh," as treated by Merleau-Ponty and others in his wake. Derrida's critique of intuitionism, notably in the phenomenological tradition, is one of the guiding threads of the book. _On Touching_ includes a wealth of notes that provide an extremely useful bibliographical resource. Personal and detached all at once, this book, one of the first published in English translation after Jacques Derrida's death, serves as a useful and poignant retrospective on the work of the philosopher. A tribute by Jean-Luc Nancy, written a day after Jacques Derrida's death, is an added feature. (shrink)

This article explores the contributions of nineteenth-century philosophers of habit to understanding the rigidity of desire. Focusing on the work of Félix Ravaisson, I argue that Of Habit (1838) makes sense of something that much queer theory fails to address in its investment in the subversion of identity: the tendency of desire to return to known objects and follow well-worn paths, a tendency that does not always result in the affirmation of norms or the consolidation of power. Of Habit (...) offers a new set of terms—crystallization, patterning, and necessity, among others—for comprehending the limits of desire’s flexibility without naturalizing gender or sexuality as permanently fixed or inherent. In so doing, it offers an alternative to queer theories that, indebted to Judith Butler’s performativity thesis, attribute the rigidities of sexual life entirely to the productive power of cultural prohibitions and discursively constructed norms. (shrink)

Peu étudiée, la querelle de la méthode, qui eut lieu entre 1828 et 1840 et mit en discussion trois nations philosophiques (Allemagne, Écosse, France) s’avère déterminante pour comprendre l’élaboration, via la réception de Schelling, d’une philosophie française. À partir de l’étude de cette querelle, ce travail propose d’identifier et d’analyser la fonction de Schelling dans l’élaboration d’une identité philosophique française, en particulier dans les spiritualismes concurrents de Victor Cousin et Félix Ravaisson. En retour, il nous ouvre de nouvelles perspectives (...) sur la philosophie française du xixe siècle, mais aussi sur la philosophie schellingienne. (shrink)

Volume 28, Issue 5, September 2020, Page 944-965.

One of the chief virtues of Gutting’s book is its ambition to tell the “relatively self-contained and coherent story” (xi) of French philosophy in this century, not just the parts of the story that American academics have seized upon as distinctive and interesting. Alongside analyses of well-known philosophers like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Derrida (a 30-40 page chapter is devoted to each), Gutting provides excellent chronological summaries of early figures like Félix Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier, Léon Brunschvicg, Henri Bergson, and (...) Gaston Bachelard who are infrequently read or discussed in English. (shrink)

How does one arrive at a life in politics and policy? What happens to one's ideals when confronted with the reality that the only way to get things done in Washington is compromise? Who are the men and women who help shape our national agenda, and what drives their work? Dispatches From the Eastern Front provides fascinating, intensely personal, yet universal answers to these central questions. Recounting four decades inside Washington politics, Gerald Felix Warburg brings remarkable candor to a most (...) unusual memoir. An idealistic California baby boomer transported to the intimidating world of Capitol Hill policymaking at a young age, Warburg finds himself working to reform nuclear energy, strategic arms control, and foreign policy. As his access and power grow, greater challenges loom: how to maintain principles while cutting deals, and how to balance public purpose with private interests. An eclectic career reveals the slow and often painful development of emotional intelligence for work at the highest reaches of the public arena. (shrink)

Since the early 1980’s, with the clinical advent of in vitro fertilization resulting in so-called “test tube babies,” a wide array of ethical considerations and concerns regarding artificial womb technology (AWT) have been described. Recent breakthroughs in the development of extracorporeal neonatal life support by means of AWT have reinitiated ethical interest about this topic with a sense of urgency. Most of the recent ethical literature on the topic, however, pertains not to the more imminent scenario of a physiologically improved (...) method of neonatal care through AWT, but instead to the remote scenario of “complete ectogenesis” that imagines human gestation occurring entirely outside of the womb. This scoping review of the ethical literature on AWT spans from more abstract concerns about complete ectogenesis to more immediate concerns about the soon-to-be-expected clinical life support of what we term the fetal neonate or fetonate. Within an organizing framework of different stages of human gestational development, from conception to the viable premature infant, we discuss both already identified and newly emerging ethical considerations and concerns regarding AWT and the care of the fetonate. (shrink)

‘A rare and remarkable book.’ Times Literary SupplementGilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. He is a key figure in poststructuralism, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.F\’elix Guattari (1930-1992) was a psychoanalyst at the la Borde Clinic, as well as being a major social theorist and radical activist. A Thousand Plateaus is part of Deleuze and Guattari’s landmark philosophical project, Capitalism and Schizophrenia - a project that still sets the (...) terms of contemporary philosophical debate. A Thousand Plateaus provides a compelling analysis of social phenomena and offers fresh alternatives for thinking about philosophy and culture. Its radical perspective provides a toolbox for ‘nomadic thought’ and has had a galvanizing influence on today’s anti-capitalist movement.Translated by Brian Massumi>. (shrink)