page_title: Félix Ravaisson-Mollien
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Félix Ravaisson-Mollien / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Jean-Gaspard-Félix Larcher Ravaisson-Mollien
context_page_description: Jean-Gaspard-Félix Laché Ravaisson-Mollien was a French philosopher, 'perhaps France's most influential philosopher in the second half of the nineteenth century'. He was originally and remains more commonly known as Félix Ravaisson. His 'seminal' 'key' work was De l’habitude, translated in English as Of Habit. Ravaisson's philosophy is in the tradition of French Spiritualism, which was initiated by Pierre Maine de Biran with the essay "The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking". However, Ravaisson developed his doctrine as what he called ‘spiritualist realism’ and ‘spiritualist positivism’, and - according to Ravaisson scholar Mark Sinclair - can be thought of as founding 'the school of contingency'. His most well known and influential successor was Henri Bergson, with whom the tradition can be seen to end during the 1930s; although the 'lineage' of this 'philosophy of life' can be seen to return in the late twentieth century with Gilles Deleuze. Ravaisson never worked in the French state university system, in his late 20s declining a position at the University of Rennes.
context_section_description: Ravaisson was born at Namur. After a successful course of study at the Collège Rollin, he went to Munich in autumn 1839, where he attended the lectures of Schelling, and took his degree in philosophy in 1836. In the following year he published the first volume of his famous work Essai sur la métaphysique d'Aristote ("Essay on the Metaphysics of Aristotle"), to which in 1846 he added a supplementary volume. This work not only criticizes and comments on the theories of Aristotle and the Peripatetics, but also develops from them a modern philosophical system.
  In 1838 he received his doctorate, his thesis entitled "De l'habitude" ("On Habit"), which was to become a classic text (a metaphysical 'poem' on nature in general apprehended through an intuitive analysis of acquired habit as a particular manifestation of its essential being, much admired by Bergson and Heidegger), and became professor of philosophy at Rennes. From 1840 he was inspector-general of public libraries, and in 1860 became inspector-general in the department of higher education. He was also a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and curator of the Department of Antiquities at the Louvre (from 1870). He died in Paris.
caption: Félix Ravaisson by Théodore Chassériau (1846)
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