Being Inclined

Abstract

Abstract This is the first book-length study in English of the work of Félix Ravaisson, France’s most influential philosopher in the second half of the nineteenth century. The book shows how in his 1838 Of Habit, Ravaisson understands habit as tendency and inclination in a way 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, the book shows how Ravaisson accounts for the nature of habit as inclination in an original manner, and within a metaphysical framework quite different from those of his predecessors in the philosophical tradition. The book 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, and particularly 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. The book offers a detailed and faithful contextualist study of Ravaisson’s short masterpiece, but it does so in demonstrating its importance for contemporary thought.