doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00684 On habit and the mind-body problem. The view of Felix

the philosopher and archeologist Felix Ravaisson deals with the study of habit by using a broad spectrum of sources ranging from Aristotle to Butler, Leibniz, Hume, Main de Biran and Schelling, among oth-ers. The combination of these authors together with the originality of Ravaisson’s own results produces a work which, though brief, has inspired some of the most important contemporary philoso-phers1. Moreover, this book has recently (2008) been translated into English for the first time, which has favored its rediscovery and redefinition in the context of current debates. Indeed, Ravaisson seems to have found in the study of habit a key point for the solution of some of the fundamental problems of philosophy such as the rela-tionship between mind and body, nature and freedom, and nature and culture (Carlisle, 2013). Moreover, his approach is distinguished from the dominant method that from Descartes onwards has been focused on the study of consciousness rather than precisely on habit. Ravaisson’s approach currently remains as challenging as in his own time. This is because the anthropological concep-tion of cognitive science is based on a clearly defined and tacitly assumed axiom: that human beings are essentially thinking beings, demonstrating that cartesianism is as valid today as in the days of Ravaisson. And for that reason, the traditional posi-tion of neuroscience tends to ignore 1Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur in phe-nomenology, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze in vitalism, andWilliam James and John Dewey in amer