Dr. Hili Razinsky will present her research proposal on the topic: "Ambivalence: A Philosophical Exploration" on 19 May 2016 (Thursday) at 16:30h at CAS Conference Hall.

Summary:

Mental ambivalence is a central phenomenon of human life, also referred to by such expressions as ‘practical conflicts', ‘internal conflicts', and ‘mixed feelings'. An ambivalent person wants and yet does not want one and the same thing (to go a certain party, to have children, a political change). She loves and hates the same person, or is happy and unhappy about the same event. People ambivalently judge practices both as just and as unjust, they ambivalently believe and disbelieve that their spouses betray them, or that the meeting today will begin on time, and they are ambivalent as to how the concept of justice or of betrayal, should be understood in a relevant context. As these examples show, ambivalence is very common and characterizes much of a person's life. While being primarily an attitude of individuals it is also central to social and cultural phenomena.
At the same time, very entrenched conceptions of subjectivity, rationality, action, belief and value all suggest that ambivalence is impossible, and when ambivalence is acknowledged, it is often conceived as tantamount to confusion, paralysis and vacillation. Against this background, I investigate ambivalence together with subjectivity, rationality, and action, extricating a concept of ambivalence from our life as people who are ambivalent, encounter ambivalence in others, ask about ambivalence, complain about it, and so forth. While there is a sense in which ambivalence constitutes a unitary concept, the differences between forms of ambivalence are important to the understanding of ambivalence and its possibilities. I thus carry out the detailed analysis of various phenomena of ambivalence, including self-deception, ambivalent paralysis, and appropriate and creative courses of ambivalent action. I focus on four modes of ambivalence, each consisting in having opposing mental attitudes of a particular type: emotional ambivalence, ambivalence of desire, ambivalence of value judgement, and ambivalence of (factual) belief.
The book analyses ambivalence in terms of two opposed attitudes while, complementarily, ambivalence is revealed as a unitary way to engage with people and things. Developing themes from Wittgenstein, Davidson, Sartre, and Freud, my account is in opposition both to the view that persons are non-ambivalent subjects and to the view that they are bundles of mental states. It is also opposed to the received view that a person who wants and does not want the same thing cannot significantly act, and I reject the various proposals to exclude ambivalence from the realm of meaningful and appropriate beliefs, judgements, and concepts.