Inclination and the Modality of Dispositions

In Getting Causes from Powers, Steven Mumford and Rani Lil Anjum have argued that all dispositions are to be thought as tendencies or inclinations; that such tendencies or inclinations have a sui generis modality, irreducible to traditional ideas of necessity or possibility; and that we have direct experience of such inclinations in our subjective experience of agency. In this paper, I critically assess these arguments in the light of 19th-century French philosophy. I turn to the work of Pierre Maine de Biran and Félix Ravaisson in order to develop the claim that a particular and irreducible modality of dispositions is indeed available to us in subjective experience – but in the particular phenomena of habit rather than within agency in general. Ravaisson’s 1838 De l’habitude provides a phenomenology of habit as inclination and a metaphysics that makes the phenomenological fact of inclination intelligible; and both this phenomenology and this metaphysics, I contend, have much to teach contemporary work in the metaphysics of powers.