The notion of habit in Spinoza and Peirce

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to explore the notion of habit in Spinoza and its relationship with the concept of habit in Peirce. Peirces’s references of the Dutch philosopher in his Collected Papers are widely known. They relate mainly to the issue of pragmaticism and the issues surrounding the realism versus nominalism. There are however good reasons to establish a relationship between Peirce and Spinoza in the specific field of habit, a concept that has gained importance today in areas as diverse as sociology (Bourdieu) and cognitive sciences (Varela, Thompson).