Being Inclined

<em>Being Inclined </em>is the first book-length study in English of the work of Felix Ravaisson France's most influential philosopher in the second half of the nineteenth century. Mark Sinclair shows how Ravaisson in his great work <em>Of Habit</em> (1838) understands habit as tendency and inclination in a way that provides the basis for a philosophy of nature and a general metaphysics. In examining Ravaisson's ideas against the background of the history of philosophy and in the light of later developments in French thought Sinclair shows how Ravaisson gives an original account of the nature of habit as inclination within a metaphysical framework quite different to those of his predecessors in the philosophical tradition. <em>Being Inclined</em> sheds new light on the history of modern French philosophy and argues for the importance of the neglected nineteenth-century French spiritualist tradition. It also shows that Ravaisson's philosophy of inclination of being-inclined is of great import for contemporary philosophy and particularly for the contemporary metaphysics of powers given that ideas about tendency have recently come to prominence in discussions concerning dispositions laws and the nature of causation. <em>Being Inclined</em> therefore offers a detailed and faithful contextualist study of Ravaisson's masterpiece demonstrating its continued importance for contemporary thought.<br>