The brain has an automated system designed to keep humans alive by promoting the search for, and remembering the location of, food. It is the motivation and reward system. The main neurotransmitter that drives our motivation and reward system is dopamine, which is the transmitter of repeat behavior. Our habits are formed by this system, and modern society offers numerous substances and activities to indulge in what can become habitual. Beneficial habits include exercise and eating lots of vegetables. Unhealthy habits include drinking too much alcohol, eating too much comfort food, and spending too much time on social media. Our habits often take hold because we use them to soothe our stress, anxiety, and depression. Habits are hard to break because they are established in our brains in networks of our brain cells.

Chapter 8 takes up what the subjectivity of socially embedded individuals involves. On the externalist view of individual autonomy, subjectivity is an embodied subjectivity because institutions and social relationships affect people’s choices and actions. To explain this idea, the chapter reviews the situated cognition and the embodied and distributed cognition literatures in cognitive science and psychology to explain the connection between social embeddedness and subjectivity. It then returns to the capability conception of individuals and what individual and personal identity involves. Using a two-level view of people’s capabilities, it argues that socially embedded individuals develop first-order capabilities regarding specific kinds of things that they can be and do and also a second-order self-concept or self-narrative capabilities in conjunction with one another, and rely on the latter to evaluate themselves in relation to their capability development. This discussion draws on the thinking of developmental psychologist Carl Rogers. How, and the extent to which, this understanding of individuals allows us to explain them as distinct and re-identifiable individuals closes the chapter.

This chapter shows that Hegel’s discussion of cognition in his Logic fits his previous conclusions on teleology. I argue first that both cognising and acting are analysed by Hegel as processes that have an inner purpose. I, then, explain what Hegel calls being alive ‘for itself’. For being alive for itself, Hegel requires that a concept be realised in a medium that is itself of an ideal, inner purposive character. The objectification of teleology in a purposive element, one that sustains its own existence, is the source of an ‘imperishable life’, as Hegel puts it –the life of a concept qua concept. The upshot of my entire discussion is that Hegel’s Science of Logic succeeds in making sense of the idea that an objective activity can be the accomplished realisation of a purpose and, indeed, of a purpose for itself.

Although learning was a key focus during the early years of mathematical psychology, the cognitive revolution of the 1960s caused the field to languish for several decades. Two breakthroughs in neuroscience resurrected the field. The first was the discovery of long-term potentiation and long-term depression, which served as promising models of learning at the cellular level. The second was the discovery that humans have multiple learning and memory systems that each require a qualitatively different kind of model. Currently, the field is well represented at all of Marr’s three levels of analysis. Descriptive and process models of human learning are dominated by two different, but converging, approaches – one rooted in Bayesian statistics and one based on popular machine-learning algorithms. Implementational models are in the form of neural networks that mimic known neuroanatomy and account for learning via biologically plausible models of synaptic plasticity. Models of all these types are reviewed, and advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches are considered.

When Hamlet instructs Gertrude to “assume a virtue if you have it not,” since “use almost can change the stamp of nature,” his counsel echoes Aristotelian ethical concepts such as “nature” and “habit” (hexis). Those concepts supplied terms used in English Protestant pastoral guidance but took on new freight given Reformation revaluations of human effort. By 1600, religious concerns – the fallen person’s capacity to perform virtuous acts, the relationship between inward disposition and outward appearance – put pressure on Aristotelian ideas. Protestant clergy rejected Aristotle’s teaching on habit because it made virtue the result of human effort and yet their recommendations for devotional practice called for the cultivation of dispositional habits in all but name. While habit as formation of character finds little representation on stage, since drama rarely shows the slow formation of character, Hamlet’s preoccupation with custom allows us to listen in on someone thinking about what the springs of action and change are, in terms fully alive to the public discourse of late Elizabethan England, and the pastoral inflection he places on hexis shows us how an inherited ethical idea can take on a fresh livery in Shakespeare’s plays.

Augustine is rightly regarded as one of the major figures of Christianity. Through him Platonist and Neo-Platonist philosophy was appropriated in the new religious context and there is hardly another thinker of the early Christian tradition who can better illustrate Nietzsche’s remark on Christianity as a Platonism for the people than Augustine. Things are, however, more complicated than Nietzsche suggests. As Étienne Gilson has showed, there is a strong tension between medieval Aristotelianism and the necessity to respect the early foundational authority, which Saint Augustine incontestably was. Aquinas has in this sense a quite complicated relation to his predecessor. In order to understand what is at stake in Augustine’s understanding of the biblical message of love, heavily influenced by Paul, it is important not only to describe the Neoplatonist roots of Augustine’s thought, but also to take the wider ancient context into account – and in this way arrive at a more complete picture of the historical and intellectual setting. The modification Augustine brings to the Aristotelian conception of the soul is hereby particularly revealing. A closer study of the relation between desire and love can shed some light on this highly significant constellation.

This chapter discussed the general precursors of the families of emotion theories to be discussed in the ensuing chapters: Darwin (1872) and James (1890b). Darwin (1872) proposed an evolutionary and eventually also a mechanistic explanation for emotional behavior, particular facial expressions. Initially goal-directed processes grow into habits (learned emotion-response links) and instincts (innate emotion-response links). Today these instincts are no longer of use, which is why they appear in weakened form as facial expressions. James (1890b), seeking a causal-mechanistic explanation for emotions themselves, proposed that stimuli activate instincts (innate stimulus-response links) and habits (learned stimulus-response links), which when enacted produce somatosensory feedback, felt as emotions. James’s (1872) theory accounted for the properties of ontogenetic and phylogenetic continuity, phenomenality, bodily aspect, heat, control precedence, and irrationality, but has difficulty delivering the right kind of (world-directed) Intentionality, and even the right kind of heat. James (1872) rejects partitioning the set of emotions into discrete subsets. Empirical evidence pro and contra James’s (1872) theory is discussed.

This chapter examines the importance of teleology (purposiveness) in the understanding of consciousness and nature. Goal-orientation is most evident in human conscious intention. However, this establishes a disjunction between conscious mind and wider nature; the latter, according to much modern science, is not purposive. How, then, does purposive mind arise in a non-purposive universe? It is argued that modern natural science rejects a particular variety of teleological explanation. More sophisticated varieties, particularly in Aquinas’s understanding of action and intention, can be recovered which do justice to our basic intuitions concerning the purposiveness of nature. However, modern natural philosophy rejects a number of metaphysical concepts which make teleological explanation intelligible. Amongst those concepts is ‘habit’. This chapter examines the Aristotelian natural philosophy of habit proposed by the nineteenth-century philosopher Félix Ravaisson. For Ravaisson, habit is a mediating category between matter and conscious intention which indicates that the goal-orientation of mind is, in an analogous sense, present throughout nature. This points to the possible recovery of a teleological understanding of nature, gleaned from a broad Aristotelian Thomism, which views creation as an expression of divine intention while avoiding crude accounts of teleology in modern design arguments for God’s existence.

Can physics be beneficial for bringing about human moral and spiritual goods? Modern physics is perpetually in search for grand unification of our world-pictures, but its method is arbitrarily self-limiting in ruling out any place in its conception of nature for the human as spiritual and moral beings. But this estrangement between nature and the human has not always been the case. Drawing from Pierre Hadot’s pioneering work, this essay retrieves the notion of physics as ‘spiritual exercise’ from ancient philosophy and early Christianity for reimagining the enterprise of physics today. Envisaged as spiritual exercise, ancient physics goes beyond a mere acquisition of ‘objective’ knowledge of nature towards the fashioning of human moral and spiritual transformation. Illustrating from Origen of Alexandria, I show that this vision of physics is principally grounded upon a metaphysics that unites all parts of nature, including human nature, into a single whole. This chapter argues that it is desirable to retrieve the ancient vision today not as a displacement of modern physics but through the re-invention of natural philosophy alongside it. This retrieval should give urgency to the task of rethinking the desirability of a comprehensive and unified metaphysical account of nature for today.

Does Plato in the Republic restrict to philosophers alone the possibility of achieving happiness in this life and the next? It is often thought so. But if that were the case, the dialogue would fail on its own terms, in its task of persuading the interlocutors Glaucon and Adeimantus that they should cultivate justice, not (as Thrasymachus argues) injustice. They are not philosophers, nor envisaged as likely to achieve the level of rational understanding that is the precondition of happiness. In truth, however, there is plentiful, if scattered, evidence that an approximation to perfect happiness is available for various categories of people figuring in the Republic who have not attained what the dialogue counts as knowledge, ranging from Socrates himself, to trainee philosophers and warriors, to farmers and craftsmen. The requirement to be satisfied is the habit of respect for the law, not from fear of its punitive powers, but internalised as the way to lead a life of justice.

In André Breton’s 1933 essay “Picasso in His Element” for the journal Minotaure, the surrealist poet underlines the intertwinement between Picasso’s recent sculptures and his studio environment, which the photographer Brassaï documented in such a way as to reflect Picasso’s everyday habits. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel and Ravaisson, this chapter explores the preeminence of nature in Breton’s essay in terms of questions of materiality and habit, the latter being a common trait shared by humans and animals. In light of Roger Caillois’s contemporaneous effort to make nature the new paradigm for a revised theory of automatism, it is argued that Breton’s reading of Picasso’s work and environment advances instead a theory of art as self-reflexive nature, which recognizes the material continuity between art and nature without reducing their relationship to one of homology.

Chaapter 5 covers the impact of experience and past behavior on attitude and behavior change. In addition to experience, the influence of past behavior can be due to biased scanning, cognitive dissonance, and self-perception. Biased scanning entails forming attitudes on the basis of thoughts about specific information associated with the behavior. Cognitive dissonance entails a conflict between one’s attitude and one’s behavior and can lead to changing the attitude to resolve the inconsistency. Self-perception theory entails inferring one’s attitude from a past behavior that is salient at the time. These processes and supporting researach are described.

This chapter examines habit across the human lifespan to develop a Deweyan account of aging and old age. After explaining Dewey's notion of habit in terms of growth and plasticity in youth, I extend Dewey's account of habit to old age. A Deweyan understanding of aging contests lay person understandings of old age that equate it with decline and an end to growth, and it offers an alternative to the implicit biology–culture dualism that can be found in the contemporary field of gerontology. As I develop this account, I challenge Dewey's racially problematic association of “civilized” habits with mature adulthood and “savage” habituation with immature children. The result is a useful Deweyan appreciation of habit in old age that neither glosses over the difficulties of being elderly nor condemns elderliness to inevitable decline.

The chapter will describe a pragmatist view of habit formation and of learning or inquiry. Indeed, one essential function of the brain is the formation of habits to suit contexts. Another major function of cephalic (mind, brain, body, world) sensibility is maintaining them. Habit formation in our species is tied to learning and inquiry; habit stability is mediated across the brain and continuous with the ecological/social milieu we are living in. There is a continuous thread between what is in the brain/body and what is not, in the neural organization of habits. The thread is quite permeable. Habits are sustained, or not, by the niche they are sculpted in, and evolve in or not.

In this introductory chapter we sketch the role that the notion of habit has played in the work of pragmatist authors such as James, Peirce and Dewey, and give an account of its ambivalent role in the development of psychology and cognitive sciences from James's introspectionism, through behaviorism and computationalism, up to 4E cognition and the rediscovery of a pragmatist action-oriented stance to cognition. We then investigate how the abandonment of the notion of habit in the second half of the twentieth century was paralleled by the adoption of a dualism between automatic routine and intelligent action and by an approach to cognition based on the notion of mental representation. We explore how habit formation has been investigated within contemporary neuroscience in a dynamic perspective based on the interplay between automatism and goal-oriented behavior. Subsequently we show that the adoption of the dualism between rational action and mechanical routines also influenced the development of twentieth-century sociological thought, and is nowadays being reconsidered by social theory. Finally, we provide an overview of the book and a chapter-by-chapter summary.

Dewey's thought is central to the organicist tradition, which views habit as “‘a primary ontological phenomenon’, shaping the person as a whole and traversing a continuum from the individual to the social, from embodied intentionality to conscious reflection”. This view enjoys a mutually supportive relationship with the theory of linguistic bodies, a nonrepresentational, world-involving account of languaging as a type of embodied social agency. Everything that a linguistic body does and thinks is conditioned by her linguistic habits. Paradoxically, each unique life is built out of the sense-making acts of others. Through constitutive openness to others’ perspectives, habits that define linguistic bodies call forth certain futures. The future depends on which utterances a community privileges and with whom it dialogues. Considering the global climate emergency, I question how we can actually change our future by disrupting the habits that currently comprise what Dewey calls “the endless chain of humanity.”