180132 SE The Phenomenology of Habits (2017S)

Lecture Plan

Seminar 1: March 8th
Introduction: Clare Carlisle (2013) On Habit, Chapter 1: The concept of habit, pp. 1-27
General Introduction to the phenomenology of Habits .This session gives an introduction to the topic of habits and provides an overview of three guiding sections of the course:

A: Knowing the world unreflectively (seminar 2-5)
In our first section of seminars, we set out to see how habits make the world familiar to us. In phenomenology, embodied practices and embodied knowledge is a way in which the world makes itself understood. We set out by establishing the relation between habits and our embodied understanding of the world.

B: Autonomy and Responsibility in Habitual Agency (Seminar 6-9)
In this second section of seminars, we investigate the relation between habits on the one hand and autonomy and freedom on the other. If we are engaged unreflectively in the world, knowing it by being emerged in it, how are we to see ourselves as responsible and free in relation to our habitual agency? Is freedom merely an exception from our otherwise unreflective actions?

C: Automatization, Unfamiliarity and Self-Alienation in Habits (Seminar 10-13)
In this third section of seminars, we question how much automatization and unreflectivness we can endure. Are there limits to our self-familiarity, are there ways in which our ownmost familiar actions can become strangely foreign to us and thus appear to us with otherness? Which kind of self-experience is at stake in habitual agency?

Seminar 2: March 15th
A1: Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012): “The Spatiality and Motility of One’s own Body” and “The synthesis of one’s own body” pp. 100-14 and pp. 137-155 in Phenomenology of Perception 2012, London: Routledge, transl. by Donald A. Landes

Seminar 3: March 22nd
A2: Heidegger, M. (1993) Sein und Zeit, §§ 14-18, pp.63-88

Seminar 4: March 29nd
A3: Ravaisson, F. (2008): Of Habit, transl. by Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair, pp. 23-77

Seminar 5: April 5th
A4: Rietveld, E. (2008): Unreflective Action. A Philosophical Contribution to Integrative Neuroscience, pp. 125-168 Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, ILLC Dissertation Series

Seminar 6: April 26th
B1: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Book II: section 1-7; Book III: section 1-5

Seminar 7: May 3th
B2: Dewey, J (1921) Human Nature and Conduct, New York; Cosimo Classics pp. 14-41; pp. 172-99;

Seminar 8: May 10th
B3: Korsgaard, C. (1996) “The Authority of Reflection” in The Source of Normativity, (Ed.) Onora O’Neill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.90-130

Seminar 9: May 17th
B4: Railton, P. (2009) “Practical competence and fluent agency” in Reasons for Action (ed.) D. Sobel and S. Wall, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.81-115

Seminar 10: May 24th
C1: Ricoeur, P. (2007) Freedom and Nature. The Voluntary and the Involuntary, Evanstone: North Western University Press, Chapter 2, section [3] “Habit”, pp.280-307

Seminar 11: May 31st
C2: Waldenfels, B. (2004) “Bodily experience between selfhood and otherness” in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (3) pp. 235-48

Seminar 12: June 7th
C3: Ratcliffe, M. (2009) “Existential Feeling and Psychopathology”, in Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology,
16(2), 179–194.

Seminar 13: June 14th
C4: Fuchs, T. (2012): “Body memory and the Unconscious” in Founding Psychoanalysis Phenomenologically. Phenomenological Theory of Subjectivity and the Psychoanalytic Experience (Ed. Lohmar, D. and Jagna Brudzinska) pp.69-82, Phaenomenologica 199, Springer