Practice vs. words? A socio-philosophical analysis of the habitus
The course will delve into one of the most debated intellectual tools in social philosophy and social theory, that is, the habitus. It will do so by discussing Pierre Bourdieu’s influential use of it. The course will be divided into three main sections. The first will analyse the notion of habitus in some detail, especially in the way Bourdieu develops it in his book The Logic of Practice. The second will take up some criticisms that have been raised against it. in doing so, the course will introduce to a few key problems in the field of social philosophy, such as determinism, functionalism, objectivism, the relation between rules and conduct and the issue of the agent-observer distinction. The third section will advance an alternative understanding of the habitus that is able to address successfully most of the criticisms analyzed in the second section of the course.

Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1990 (page range: 2-140).
Mariano Croce, “The Habitus and the Critique of the Present. A Wittgensteinian Reading of Bourdieu’s Social Theory”, Sociological Theory, 33(4) (2015): 327–346.
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005 (page range: 2-140).
Anthony King, “Thinking with Bourdieu against Bourdieu: A ‘Practical’ Critique of the Habitus”, Sociological Theory 18(3) (2000): 417-433.