Università Roma Tre

The course intends to present the main conceptual nodes that innervate the so-called Philosophies of Habit, that is the philosophical reflections on habit from modernity onwards, with particular attention to the development that this theme assumes especially from the nineteenth century, also in correlation with others issues that affect the debate between philosophy and psychology, such as madness and certain developments in neurophysiology, given that the debate on habit has rediscovered its vivacity in contemporary cognitive sciences.The first teaching unit (3 CFU) will be reserved for an overview of the philosophies of habit by Aristotle until the middle of the nineteenth century. The second teaching unit (3 CFU) will focus on the following philosophies of habit, with particular attention to the debate of the late nineteenth century, influenced by the evolutionary paradigm, thanks also to the reading and commentary of passages from the texts of Léon Dumont (1876) Victor Egger (1880), and William James (1887) on habit.

Unit 1:
1. Marco Piazza, Creature dell’abitudine. Abito, costume, seconda natura da Aristotele alle scienze cognitive, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2018
2. Denise Vincenti, Abitudine e follia. Studi di storia della filosofia e della psicologia, Milan, Mimesis, 2019 (execpt chapter I).
Unit 2:
3. Léon Dumont, L'abitudine, ed. by D. Vincenti, Milan, Mimesis, 2020
4. Victor Egger, La nascita delle abitudini, ed. by S. Sandreschi, Milan, Mimesis, 2021
5. William James, Le leggi dell’abitudine, ed, by D. Vincenti, Milan, Mimesis, 2019 - original English text available online at the URL = https://archive.org/details/popularsciencemo30newy/page/n449
6. Goodman, Russell, "William James", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/james/