Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Ambivalence: A Philosophical Exploration

Ambivalence (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. Review Ambivalence by Hili Razinsky is a rather theoretical and conceptual exploration of the ways in which a person's mind oscillates between two opposing desires, reasons or other elements of mental life. The book's impact on philosophical practice will grow in time because it is a fairly difficult yet rewarding read that provokes the reader's reflection after turning its final page.-- "Philosophical Practice" Hili Razinsky is comprehensive in her treatment of ambivalence, which she defines as a 'tension-fraught', first-personal state in which a subject has two opposed attitudes, simultaneously, towards the same thing, and holds them as opposed. ... If Razinsky succeeds in defending her position, then we would need to rethink, at the very least, personhood, (basic) rationality, and agency--and in particular the ways in which we understand mental states, like desires, judgments, and emotions, and their relations with rationality, personhood, and agency.-- "Philosophical Papers" Hili 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" 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