The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence

This book collects original essays by top scholars that address questions about the nature, origins, and effects of ambivalence. While the nature of agency has received an enormous amount of attention, relatively little has been written about ambivalence or how it relates to topics such as agency, rationality, justification, knowledge, autonomy, self-governance, well-being, social cognition, and various other topics. Ambivalence presents unique questions related to many major philosophical debates. For example, it relates to debates about virtues, rationality, and decision-making, agency or authenticity, emotions, and social or political metacognition. It is also relevant to a variety of larger debates in philosophy and psychology, including nature vs. nature, objectivity vs. subjectivity, or nomothetic vs. idiographic. The essays in this book offer novel and wide-ranging perspectives on this emerging philosophical topic. They will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and social cognition.

Berit Brogaard is Professor of Philosophy and Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami. Her areas of research include philosophy of perception, philosophy of emotions, and philosophy of language. She is the author of Transient Truths (Oxford University Press, 2012), On Romantic Love (Oxford University Press, 2015), The Superhuman Mind (Penguin, 2015), Seeing & Saying (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Hate: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2020). Dimitria Electra Gatzia is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Akron. She received a Research Fellowship at the Centre of Philosophy Psychology at the University of Antwerp (2016-2017) and a Research Fellowship at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy (Summer 2020). She has published numerous scholarly and popular articles on perception, consciousness, cognitive penetration, synesthesia, imagination, and physics. She is the co-editor (with Berit Brogaard) of The Epistemology of Non-visual Perception (Oxford University Press, 2020).

1. The Philosophical and Psychological Significance of Ambivalence: An Introduction Brit Brogaard and Dimitria Electra Gatzia Part I: Ambivalence, Rationality, and Truth 2. Ambivalence, Incoherence, and Self-Governance John Brunero 3. Ambivalence-Autonomy Compatibilism J. S. (Jenny) Blumenthal-Barby 4. Irrationality, Charity, and Ambivalence Eric Wiland 5. Rational Epistemic Akrasia for the Ambivalent Pragmatist Neil Sinhababu 6. Ambivalence, Uncertainty, and Modality Barry Lam and Brett Sherman 7. Epistemic Vertigo Duncan Pritchard Part II: Ambivalence, Emotions, and Intentionality 8. Fitting Inconsistency and Reasonable Irresolution Simon D. Feldman and Allan Hazlett 9. Self-Hatred, Self-Acceptance, and Self-Love Katy Abramson and Adam Leite 10. To Express or not to Express: Ambivalence about Emotional Expressions Trip Glazer 11. Intentionalism, Ambivalent Emotions, and the Body Kathryn Pendoley and Sarah Arnaud Part III: Ambivalence, Racism, and Global Justice 12. Cognitive Dissonance and the Logic of Racism Berit Brogaard and Dimitria Electra Gatzia 13. The Body Politic Is of Two Minds: Political Ambivalence on Norms of Justice Jill Delston Part IV: Ambivalence, Well-Being, and Subjectivity 14. Ambivalence, Well-being, and Prudential Rationality Jason R. Raibley 15. Bridling the Mindless Ambivalence: Langerian Mindfulness and Suspension of Intentionality Sayyed Mohsen Fatemi and Ellen Langer 16. Ambivalence and the Borderline Position in the Existential-Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: On Being and Having a Body-in-the-World from Primal Ambivalence to Intersubjective Ambiguity Frank Scalambrino