This paper shows how reflection on habit leads in nineteenth-century French philosophy to Henri Bergson’s idea of duration in 1888 as a non-quantifiable dimension irreducible to time as measured by clocks. Historically, I show how Albert Lemoine’s 1875 L’habitude et l’instinct was crucial, since he holds – in a way that is both Ravaissonian and Bergsonian avant la lettre – that for the being capable of habit, the three elements of time are fused together. For that habituated being, Lemoine claims, (...) it is not true to say that the past is no longer, nor even that the future is not yet. This historical link between Ravaisson and Bergson, however, only sharpens the philosophical question of how a dynamic conception of habit involves and requires a conception of real duration, of a temporality more original than clock-time, and, conversely, of how reflection on duration prior to clock-time involves a notion of habit. With reference to the work of Gilles Deleuze, the paper concludes by showing that there is an internal connection between these two grand philosophical themes of nineteenth- and then twentieth-century French thought: habit and time. (shrink)

In the following text I reexamine the connotations of the term habit from the perspective of Peirce’s pragmatism. I start by tracing back the roots of the term in the Metaphysical Club’s discussions of Alexander Bain’s theory of belief. By stressing the relative overlap between belief and habit I am also proposing that the latter term transcends the boundaries of empirical psychology. Peirce’s well-known antipathy to psychologism in logic raised the status of habit to a universal concept that participates in (...) the unlimited process of interpretation. Habit, therefore, falls into a new lineage of meaning that can be traced back to antiquity and turns into a generative notion with extensive connotations. As a result it becomes an inseparable part of Peirce architectonic philosophy, capable to shed new light on his evolutionary cosmology and metaphysics. Conceiving of habit as an operative element in the evolution of all phenomena in the universe is the main objective of this article. (shrink)