Abstract

Although some of the most important figures in the history of philosophy have had something interesting to say about habit, habitual action has been largely neglected in contemporary action theory. An attempt to mitigate the consequences of this neglect has been recently made by Bill Pollard. Pollard’s approach, however, cannot do full justice to the distinctiveness of habitual action with respect to its phenomenology. The reason is that, as with most treatments of habit in the philosophical tradition, it fails to distinguish habit from skill. It is only when this distinction is drawn that certain questions regarding the phenomenology of habit can be properly formulated.