Chapter 14 Habits, Tendencies, and Habitus: The Embodied Soul’s Dispositions of Mind, Body, and Person
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Dispositional and teleological approaches to virtue depend upon one's views of person and nature. Reinterpreting a Thomistic embodied soul within findings of cognitive neuroscience and C.S. Peirce's objective idealism suggests fruitful resonances across mind, body, person, and nature. A turn toward habit as the primary construct for modeling reality identifies interconnected habits as providing sufficient stability for human dynamic processes without requiring a static substrate. Using tendencies to model molecular, physiological, and functional processes of the brain resonates with psychological models of mental habits and the habitus of the socially, historically, and culturally embedded human person. Connecting natural and social science with philosophical and theological investigations around a shared focus on dispositions yields a deep and rich framework for a teleonomic study of virtue.