Samir Chopra

I’m pleased to make note here of the release, on March 19th, of my book Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide published by Princeton University Press. Here is the book’s description and cover: <blockquote><small>Today, anxiety is usually thought of as a pathology, the most diagnosed and medicated of all psychological disorders. But anxiety isn’t always or only a medical condition. Indeed, many…

The worst kind of listener isn’t the one that is patently distracted (by thumb-flashing smartphone interaction or some endless performative scrolling), cannot make eye contact, shows through their follow-up questions that they weren’t paying attention anyway, rolls their eyes, or indulges in several other variants of not-so-passive aggressiveness.) No, the worst kind of listener is the one that…

The Anxieties Of A Beautiful Day

That mysterious, terrible anxiety felt on a beautiful day–whether that of the spring, summer, fall, or winter–is perhaps better understood when we realize that such anxiety is not one, but many anxieties. To wit, that anxiety is: The anxiety of not knowing whether this beautiful day is not the harbinger of a terrible day; for do not all accounts of disaster begin by noting the innocent beauty of…

America, Let’s Just Keep Our Flag At Half-Mast, OK?

Folks, we have a problem on our hands. Every few days, or weeks, we put the hard-working men and women who are in charge of lowering and raising our national flag–whether in parks, schools, public libraries, post offices, or anywhere else–to considerable hardship. To wit, we make them repeatedly perform the tedious task of lowering the Stars and Stripes down to half-mast, and then raising it…

Book Release Announcement: ‘Shyam Benegal: Filmmaker and Philosopher’

I’m pleased to make note here that my book ‘Shyam Benegal: Filmmaker and Philosopher‘ has been released by Bloomsbury Books. Here is the book cover and the jacket copy: For almost fifty years now, Shyam Benegal has been a leading artistic, political, and moral force in Indian cinema. Informed by a rich political and philosophical sensibility and a mastery of the art and craft of filmmaking,…

The Gabba As Field Of Dreams

All sports fans are sustained by fantasies. They are our white ravens, the sights we imagine we will never see, because they are ruled out by improbabilities, but they still sustain us. For they bring us back to the ‘action’ again and again, hoping against hope and empirical plausibility, letting their associated dreams and wonderings live and flower within us, because it is they, and not…

I ‘CrossFitted.’ And I’m Brown. But I just didn’t CrossFit anywhere. I trained at CrossFit South Brooklyn (CFSBK). That is a crucial component of my “CrossFitting While Brown” experience. Being brown and chasing ‘elite fitness’ does not necessarily entail a conceptual clash between the two, but my personal insecurities and the cultural placement of CrossFitwhen I started at CFSBK back in 2009,…

Anxiety And Philosophical Inquiry

My essay in Psyche Magazine on the intimate linkage of anxiety and philosophical inquiry is online today.

Killing a Friendship Over Email

Modern relationships end in strange ways. Last year, a friend terminated a friendship with me over email. We had not met in over a year, and had been exchanging emails on trying to find a time and place to meet and ‘catch up.’ Arranging a meeting time with another ambitious New Yorker that works is an intractable task at the best of times; still, my friend and I, thanks to our emailing back and…

The American Republic Stands By For A 3-6 Shellacking

The American Republic, not content with having one election decided by nine unelected officials (Bush v. Gore, circa 2000), is gearing up yet again to have its Grand Prize, its esteemed (and very expensive) presidential election, decided by another unelected jurisprudential posse – the Supremes, all the better now for having replaced one punchy acronym RBG with yet another, ACB. Behold the…

William James On The ‘Automatic, Therapeutic Decision’

In Existential Psychotherapy, Irvin Yalom, writing of conscious, directed, self-therapeutic change, writes of the ‘essential’ role of personal decisions and choices in ‘effective’ therapy, and invokes William James‘ five-fold taxonomy of decisions “only two of which, the first and the second, involve “willful” effort”:

1. Reasonable decision. We consider the arguments for and against a given…

Cover And Catalog Copy For ‘The Evolution of a Cricket Fan: My Shapeshifting Journey’

The good folks at Temple University Press have a cover design for my forthcoming book, ‘The Evolution of a Cricket Fan: My Shapeshifting Journey.’

Here is the catalog copy for the book:

An autobiographical account of a cricket lover’s journey across nations and identities

The Evolution of a Cricket Fan: A Shapeshifting Journey

Samir Chopra is an immigrant, a “voluntary…

Children: The Familiar And Strange, The Known And Unknown

Parenting, and my relationship with my daughter, is persistently fraught by the presence of two seemingly incompatible states of affairs.

First, my child seems utterly familiar to me, the most intimately known person in our family: I was with her at her birth, and have been a companion and guardian since then, cleaning, bathing, feeding, escorting to school, playing with, teaching, comforting,…

Mark Twain On The ‘Growing’ Wisdom Of Our Parents

Mark Twain is famously said to have revised his assessment of his parents’ wisdom:

When I was seventeen I was convinced my father was a damn fool. When I was twenty-one I was astounded by how much the old man had learned in four years.

Twain’s words speak to a crucial perspectival aspect of our life: our critical judgments are a function of our lived lives and experiences. We appreciate our…

Philosophy Department As ‘Houses Of Healing,’ Not ‘Houses Of Production’

In ‘Two Pedagogies for Happiness: Healing Goals and Healing Methods in the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas and the Śrī Bhāsyạ of Rāmānuja,’¹ Martin Ganeri (citing Paul Griffiths) writes:

[T]he root metaphor for scholastic intellectual practice is that of reading. The scholastic is one who is dominated by the text he studies, transformed by the text, and the scholastic institution is…

Kierkegaard On Being Educated By Possibility (And Anxiety)

In The Concept of Anxiety, Soren Kierkegaard writes

Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility, and only he who is educated by possibility is educated according to his infinitude. Therefore possibility is the weightiest of all categories….in possibility all things are equally possible, and whoever has truly been brought up by possibility has grasped the terrible as well as the…

Getting Pulled Over; A Teachable Moment

Last week, while driving in Ketchum, Idaho, I was pulled over for speeding (driving 36 mph in a 25-mph zone.) The traffic stop proceeded along expected lines: the police car switched on its flashing red and blue lights as it sidled up behind me, I pulled over to the side of the road, the policeman walked over and asked for my driver’s license and vehicle registration and insurance etc. After I…