Introduction to the Proceedings of the Workshop “Habits and Rituals” at IS4SI-2017 Gothenburg, Sweden, 15 June 2017

Other text in scientific journal, 2017

Habits and rituals play a fundamental role in human life [1] and are worthy to be considered also because they represent a form of embodied knowledge. According to Dubray, habits can be studied in general, but also with the focus on their physiological, psychological, ethical, pedagogical, philosophical and theological aspects. They have been analyzed mostly by disciplines like anthropology, sociology and psychology. Nowadays, the importance of habits is recognized in the development of robotics, where the problem is to help elderly or sick people to continue their ordinary life and practices. Philosophy as well offers interesting analyses from different perspectives, from Aristotle to Bourdieu. Aristotle relates habits to virtues, while Peircean habits connect to the life of symbols in relation to their embodied grounding.