The academic state of mind is distinguished, I think, by a peculiar kind of dissonance; the academic is able to entertain two conflicting states of being simultaneously; each informs the other and brings to it its peculiar intensity and torment. At one end of its affective and emotional spectrum lies the well-known impostor syndrome: theContinue reading “The Academic’s Peculiar Dissonance”
Tag Archives: impostor syndrome
Political Pathology And The Inability To Accept Love
In a post on ‘the underestimation of the capacity to love‘ I wrote of its converse, ‘the inability to accept love’: That inability, that lowered view of oneself, the judgment that one is unworthy of the love, caring and commitment that is sent our way by our lovers, parents, children, and friends, leads many to rejectContinue reading “Political Pathology And The Inability To Accept Love”
The Virtuous, Ubiquitous Skipping Of Lines And Pages
In Immortality (HarperCollins, New York, 1990), Milan Kundera writes, If a reader skips a single sentence of my novel he won’t be able to understand it, and yet where in the world will you find a reader who never skips a line? Am I not myself the greatest skipper of lines and pages? As a childContinue reading “The Virtuous, Ubiquitous Skipping Of Lines And Pages”
Peter Gay On Bourgeois Insecurities (And Mine)
In Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, (WW Norton, New York, 1998) Peter Gay writes: Only the most determined could gather up the leisure and the energy after a hard week’s toil, or for that matter the money, to haunt museums, or follow compositions in the concert hall with a score, let alone travelContinue reading “Peter Gay On Bourgeois Insecurities (And Mine)”
Of Therapy And Personal And Academic Anxieties
Reading some of the discussion sparked by Peter Railton’s Dewey Lecture has prompted me to write this post. In the fall of 1996, I began studying for my Ph.D qualifier exams. I had worked full-time at a non-academic job for the previous year, saving up some money so that I could take a month orContinue reading “Of Therapy And Personal And Academic Anxieties”
‘Don’t Call Me A Philosopher’
I cringe, I wince, when I hear someone refer to me as a ‘philosopher.’ I never use that description for myself. Instead, I prefer locutions like, “I teach philosophy at the City University of New York”, or “I am a professor of philosophy.” This is especially the case if someone asks me, “Are you aContinue reading “‘Don’t Call Me A Philosopher’”
The Underestimation Of Our Capacity To Love
In response to my post yesterday on biological and adoptive parents, my friend Maureen Eckert wrote: Another way to think about this is that the tragedy is that people routinely underestimate their capacity to love. Maybe that is terrifying in all its implications. My older doubts about adoption, which I expressed at the beginning ofContinue reading “The Underestimation Of Our Capacity To Love”
Of Academic Genealogies
Yesterday, in a post on this blog, I wrote about the most familiar kinds of genealogies, the familial, and the quest to uncover their details. Today, I want to make note of another kind of genealogy that sometimes obsesses folks like me: our academic ones. Some thirteen odd years ago, shortly after I had finished myContinue reading “Of Academic Genealogies”
Samir Chopra 