This chapter situates in the social context of Tokugawa Japan the emergence of a class of scholars who engaged in the production of texts and in practices that aimed at developing authoritative inquiries on the nature of reality and the laws that govern it (metaphysics); the motivations, norms, and aims of moral life (ethics); the function and rules of language (philology and linguistics); the principles of good government (politics); and the legitimation of cognitive claims (epistemology), among others. Operating within different institutional frameworks and through texts circulating in a variety of formats (manuscript and printed commentaries, treatises, glossaries, dictionaries, collected lecture notes, etc.), these scholars (generically known as jusha) developed a philosophical archive that should be regarded as a qualitatively and quantitatively unprecedented event in Japanese history outside Buddhist institutions.

Habits are fundamental for embodied action. In order to contribute to an embodied account of habit formation, we will bring together the ontological approaches of William James (1842–1910), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), and Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). James treats habits as key to the mind, placing them at the center of his ontology. James argues that the laws of nature characterize immutable habits of matter, and that living things are “bundles of habits.” Likewise, habits play a central role in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. The “lived body,” which Merleau-Ponty often refers to as the “habit body,” determines the character of experience. Nishida argues, following James, that habits structure human behavior and exemplify the continuity of reality. Nishida's nondualism fuses the embodied subject and the ontological world using habits. This has important implications for an embodied theory of habits, and thus for embodied cognitive science. We conclude by exploring ways that Nishida's work Enactivism, and ecological psychology mutually benefit when explored together.