Félix Ravaisson-Mollien
Jean Gaspard Félix Lacher 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 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 'spiritual realism' 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. In 1838, he was employed as the principle private secretary to the minister of public instruction, going on to secure high-ranking positions such as inspector general of libraries, and then the curator of classical antiquities at the Louvre. Later in his life he was appointed as the president of the jury of the Aggregation of philosophy in France, 'a position of considerable influence'. Ravaisson, was not only a philosopher, classicist, archivist, and educational administrator, but also a painter exhibiting under the name Laché.
Biography
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, 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, which was to become a classic text, 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. He died in Paris in 1900.