Abstract: In this chapter, the authors delve into the context of cybersecurity and explore the concept of security mindset in relation to cyber education and John Dewey’s “democratic ideal.” The chapter proposes John Dewey’s robust theory of habit in Human Nature and Conduct (1922) as a grounding foundation for conceptualizing a core component of security mindset, namely the human capacity for intelligent adaptation and growth within ever-changing environments. In submitting this linkage between Dewey’s conception of habit and security mindset, the author’s purpose is more than to advance Deweyan habit as an intelligible enrichment to current cybersecurity ideas for how to manage threats. Going further, they forward the connection between Deweyan habit and security mindset to extend the kind of foundation necessary for advancing cybersecurity’s ability to meet diverse and evolving cybersecurity threats through cyber education. With this, a process of disruption that leads to the subsequent reorganization of habit can bring into view simultaneously the threats to democracy as well as the process of democracy itself.

Abstract: In this chapter, Herbert explores John Dewey’s concept of impulse in Human Nature and Conduct (1922), highlighting its oft-neglected role in his theory of agency. Dewey presents impulse as a spontaneous and creative force essential for breaking rigid habits and fostering intelligent inquiry. Unlike moral theories that treat impulse as something to suppress, he sees it as crucial to moral growth and adaptation. Dewey’s naturalistic framework situates impulse within a dynamic interplay with habit and intelligence. While habit provides stability, impulse introduces novelty, enabling the reorganization of conduct when patterns fail. This aligns Dewey with Peirce’s view of inquiry as emerging from disrupted expectations and contrasts with Bergson’s élan vital, which lacks Dewey’s empirical grounding. Dewey also engages implicitly with Freud, critiquing reductionist views of instinct while endorsing the constructive redirection of impulses through sublimation. Dewey envisions ethics as a form of empirical inquiry, treating moral agency as continuous experimentation rather than rule adherence. As Herbert concludes, Dewey critiques traditional moral philosophies for their distrust of impulse, arguing that rigid norms stifle creativity. Instead, Dewey advocates an ethics that integrates impulse, habit, and intelligence into a flexible and adaptive model for human flourishing.

Abstract: In Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Dewey writes that bad habits are ones that have a “command over us” making us “do things we prefer not to do,” because as he puts it, “we are the habit.” In this chapter, Striano describes how education has a role in our understanding of the command of habit over our lives. The chapter considers how within the process of growth we can start reshaping our habits, making them increasingly intelligent so as to inform “intelligent dispositions.” Intelligent dispositions are central to helping us come to perform new, more reflective, courses of action in the world. The chapter concludes with the ideas that such intelligently reconstructed habits − ones that have been channeled through educative experiences which account for both human plasticity and the changes and “obstacles” in our environment − have the power to determine an effective transformation of our attitudes, behaviors, and understandings and, therefore, of our selves.

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. It thereby introduces some unique ideas and approaches to the analysis of concepts. Looking largely to pragmatism’s founder, Charles Peirce, this chapter presents an account of concepts as habits which associate specific kinds of environmental stimuli with schemata of action and ensuing experience, within linguistic communities. I explain how this account avoids Sellars’ ‘Myth of the Given’. I then explore how Peirce’s semiotic approach to philosophy of language and mind theorized signifying habits as symbols which draw icons and indices together into propositional structures, thereby generating meanings that are specifically applicable and indefinitely generalizable. This original account of concept formation is further illuminated through an examination of Peirce’s philosophy of perception, which makes particularly manifest the process whereby primitive indices, or ‘percepts’, are enfolded in symbolic meanings through habitual ‘perceptual judgements’.

Abstract: In this chapter, Wahlström focuses on teaching as a continuous way of acting, although of course with variations. Continuous and repeated actions are developed into what we may call “habits” in terms of more or less unconscious actions that teachers develop when structuring their teaching content and organizing the teaching process. Central to the idea of teaching developed in this chapter is John Dewey’s understanding of habit in Human Nature and Conduct (1922). In order to capture Dewey’s understanding of the concept of habit in its relation to quality teaching, Wahlström analyzes the concept of habit in relation to four analytic aspects of routine developed by Anna Sfard (2023): the “task situation,” “recursive constructs,” “interconnected systems,” and “creativity.” The chapter shows that while routine is a recurrent repetition of already manifested patterns, habits, in Dewey’s sense, are open to the new and changing. Habits can be carried out in a novel way with unforeseen results that can make room for social change. Wahlström’s argument is that understanding teaching as a habit necessarily directs teachers’ attention to the everyday actions in the classroom and to the potential of their habits of teaching to support students’ self-realization.

Alexandra Newton discusses the relation between virtue and habit in Kant’s moral philosophy. While commentators frequently claim that Kant rejects Aristotle’s definition of virtue as a type of habit, Newton argues that this overlooks the fact that Kant distinguishes different kinds of habit. While he rejects the idea that virtue is a habit of action or desire, like Aristotle he allows virtue to be a habit of choice (hexis prohairetike), understood as an exercise of practical reason. Carefully distinguishing the different notions of habit Kant delineates thus allows us to see that his conception of virtue is more Aristotelian than commonly assumed. At the same time, Newton notes, there remain important points on which Kant’s conception diverges from Aristotle’s, having to do specifically with the temporal character of virtue

On 18 October 1932, the young Samuel Beckett, highly uncertain about his poetry, wrote a letter to his friend, the poet and critic Thomas McGreevy, drawing a distinction between conscious, agential events, and reflex actions. The tension between the conscious, agential subject, and automatic bodily events comes to constitute a key concern in Beckett’s writing, which dedicates meticulous attention to those bodily functions that fall between intentional and non-intentional acts, such as sexual reflexes, breathing, habitual actions, and even, at times, the production of speech itself. In staging this tension, Beckett is in search of a literary form to accommodate an emerging understanding of the self that has its origins in a finding of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century neurology: the discovery of the autonomous nervous system as independent or near-independent from the conscious, intentional subject.

This chapter is partly about how actions are executed and how the details of people’s behavioral performance should be explained. But it also introduces some classes of action that find no place within the standard belief-desire model. These include habitual actions as well as speeded skilled actions, including many speech actions. To the extent that philosophers have addressed these kinds of action at all, their theories have run the gamut from complete mindlessness to full-blown intellectualism. The chapter critiques some influential accounts of the latter sort, after emphasizing that skilled actions are as distinctively human as are our rational capacities.

Digital behavior does not occur in isolation within space, but is instead ever-present, vying for a user’s time against other alternative behaviors. The determinants of behavior choice are diverse, yet in behavioral sciences, this “behavioral competition” is operationalized by alterations in the value of the contingent reinforcer to latent behaviors. In this competitive environment, where the user has limited time to enact certain behaviors, they must choose by seeking a balance that maximizes their satisfaction (law of diminishing marginal utility & utility maximization model). This shifting process is known as behavioral contrast, which reflects a variation in some behavioral component due to the change in the value of reinforcers associated with any of the present behaviors. In the design of digital behaviors, understanding this process is fundamental, as it directs the designer towards potential enhancements of the digital service (through improving the reinforcers) to better its positioning against competitors.

The brain has an automated system designed to keep humans alive by promoting the search for, and remembering the location of, food. It is the motivation and reward system. The main neurotransmitter that drives our motivation and reward system is dopamine, which is the transmitter of repeat behavior. Our habits are formed by this system, and modern society offers numerous substances and activities to indulge in what can become habitual. Beneficial habits include exercise and eating lots of vegetables. Unhealthy habits include drinking too much alcohol, eating too much comfort food, and spending too much time on social media. Our habits often take hold because we use them to soothe our stress, anxiety, and depression. Habits are hard to break because they are established in our brains in networks of our brain cells.

Chapter 8 takes up what the subjectivity of socially embedded individuals involves. On the externalist view of individual autonomy, subjectivity is an embodied subjectivity because institutions and social relationships affect people’s choices and actions. To explain this idea, the chapter reviews the situated cognition and the embodied and distributed cognition literatures in cognitive science and psychology to explain the connection between social embeddedness and subjectivity. It then returns to the capability conception of individuals and what individual and personal identity involves. Using a two-level view of people’s capabilities, it argues that socially embedded individuals develop first-order capabilities regarding specific kinds of things that they can be and do and also a second-order self-concept or self-narrative capabilities in conjunction with one another, and rely on the latter to evaluate themselves in relation to their capability development. This discussion draws on the thinking of developmental psychologist Carl Rogers. How, and the extent to which, this understanding of individuals allows us to explain them as distinct and re-identifiable individuals closes the chapter.

This chapter shows that Hegel’s discussion of cognition in his Logic fits his previous conclusions on teleology. I argue first that both cognising and acting are analysed by Hegel as processes that have an inner purpose. I, then, explain what Hegel calls being alive ‘for itself’. For being alive for itself, Hegel requires that a concept be realised in a medium that is itself of an ideal, inner purposive character. The objectification of teleology in a purposive element, one that sustains its own existence, is the source of an ‘imperishable life’, as Hegel puts it –the life of a concept qua concept. The upshot of my entire discussion is that Hegel’s Science of Logic succeeds in making sense of the idea that an objective activity can be the accomplished realisation of a purpose and, indeed, of a purpose for itself.

Although learning was a key focus during the early years of mathematical psychology, the cognitive revolution of the 1960s caused the field to languish for several decades. Two breakthroughs in neuroscience resurrected the field. The first was the discovery of long-term potentiation and long-term depression, which served as promising models of learning at the cellular level. The second was the discovery that humans have multiple learning and memory systems that each require a qualitatively different kind of model. Currently, the field is well represented at all of Marr’s three levels of analysis. Descriptive and process models of human learning are dominated by two different, but converging, approaches – one rooted in Bayesian statistics and one based on popular machine-learning algorithms. Implementational models are in the form of neural networks that mimic known neuroanatomy and account for learning via biologically plausible models of synaptic plasticity. Models of all these types are reviewed, and advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches are considered.