Abstract
Habits and rituals represent a relevant field to investigate human behavior also in comparison with non human animals and nature in general. We move from very interesting perspectives that cross philosophy and neuroscience to establish a continuity between individual and social habits and to clearly isolate what makes human rituals peculiar in the field of social ontology. Therefore, we introduce a general and brief discussion on rituals in different disciplines before to focus on the actuality of the Aristotelian notion of habit in relationship with some studies in neuroscience that can be extended to the social context. The perspective of We-Intentionality introduced by John Searle embeds the dimensions of habits that ground cooperation and is very useful to describe the peculiarity of human rituals.
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Notes
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Habermas is interested in the continuum of the development of rituals as a result of communication habits in living organisms—animals and humans alike. Gordana Dodig Crnkovic wonders what the essential difference between animals and plants results in animals (with humans) having ritual, patterned, repeating, symbolic, indirectly purposeful communication procedures while we cannot detect rituals in plants—even though plants exhibit rich forms of communication. Can it be that animals (including humans) move, and that movement as a part of communication plays an important role in rituals?
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Giovagnoli, R. (2020). From Habits to We-Intentionality: Rituals as Social Habits. In: Giovagnoli, R., Lowe, R. (eds) The Logic of Social Practices. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 52. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37305-4_12
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