Description
Book SynopsisAmbivalence (as in practical conflicts, moral dilemmas, conflicting beliefs, and mixed feelings) is a central phenomenon of human life. Yet ambivalence is incompatible with entrenched philosophical conceptions of personhood, judgement, and action, and is denied or marginalised by thinkers of diverse concerns. This book takes a radical new stance, bringing the study of core philosophical issues together with that of ambivalence. The book proposes new accounts in several areas – including subjectivity, consciousness, rationality, and value – while elucidating a wide range of phenomena expressive of ambivalence, from emotional ambivalence to self-deception. The book rejects the view that ambivalence makes a person divided, showing that our tension-fraught attitudes are profoundly unitary. Ambivalence is not tantamount to confusion or to paralysis: it is always basically rational, and often creative, active, and perceptive as well. The book develops themes from Wittgenstein, Davidson, Sartre, and Freud. It engages with contemporary debates in Analytic Philosophy in addition to work ranging from Aristotle to Cultural Studies and Empirical Psychology, and considers a rich set of examples from daily life and literature.
Trade ReviewHili Razinsky's philosophical exploration of ambivalence is not only about ambivalence: it might be read as a call for using more substantial, phenomenologically nuanced, and real-life faithful terms in contemporary analytic philosophy. Concepts, such as belief, desire or emotion, which are at the center of many philosophical discussions about subjectivity, are often difficult to project onto real subjects. They seem to be fossils that have already lost their vividness. Some of them are brought to life in Razinsky's book. * Metapsychology Online *
The author has produced a bold and fiercely independent account of ambivalence; an account which is rich, nuanced and detailed. Razinsky adopts a framework which, broadly speaking, is both Wittgensteinian and phenomenological. She turns to such diverse authors as Sartre, Freud, Bernard Williams and Philip Koch and with a little help from these friends devises her own notion of ambivalence. -- Avishai Margalit, Schulman Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
One of the main strengths of this book is a detailed map of terms and theories connected with the phenomenon of ambivalence Razinsky depicts. It could be useful for further research on such topics as emotions, values, personhood, rationality, as well as the relations between them. […] Razinsky’s work provides helpful insight into considerations of the problem of ambivalence in general. On the one hand, the author exhaustively reveals the problems of ambivalence, its rational character, the relations of ambivalence with consciousness, factual belief, value judgment and desire, the differences between the notions of “unity in plurality” and harmonized, plural persons. On the other hand, she provides insights into avenues of further research of related problems, such as doubt, cynicism and irony. * Eidos: A Journal for Philosophy Eidos of Culture, Vol. 1, no. 3, 2018 *
Razinsky … argues that ambivalence is not merely common but pervasive, and that the possibility of ambivalent states, whether of belief, desire, or emotion, is built into the nature of those states and the way in which we conceptualize them from the start. One advantage of this approach is that it rejects from the start any possibility of treating the phenomena in question as merely marginal * Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy, January 2019 *
Table of ContentsPart I: Beginnings / 1. Introduction / 2. Philosophical Approaches to Ambivalence: A Roadmap of a Rough Terrain / Part II: Life with Ambivalence / 3. Unity in Plurality: The Case of Emotional Ambivalence / 4. Behavioural Conflict: The Case of Emotional Ambivalence / 5. Conscious Ambivalence and Its Bearings on the Character of Consciousness / 6. Pursuits of Harmony, Integration and Freud’s Person / Part III: Structures of Ambivalence / 7. Self-deception, Ambivalence of Belief and Basic Rationality / 8. Ambivalence of Value Judgement, Deliberation and the Logic of Value / 9. The Openness of Desire and Action in Ambivalence / Appendix A / Bibliography / Bibliographic note
