Samir Chopra is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center at

CUNY.

His books include a legal theory for autonomous artificial agents

and eye on cricket reflections on the great game. He has a new book entitled Anxiety,

a philosophical guide. That is our topic today. Welcome, Professor Chopra.

Anxiety, this is certainly a timely topic. Rates of anxiety are going up in the United States,

especially among young people. Now, you actually state, I mean, one of the big adjustments,

I should say, is in how we understand what anxiety is, what place

it can or should or should not have in our lives. First, why do you give us your working

definition of anxiety in the book?

Thanks, Mark.

I would say the working definition of anxiety that I am working with is that anxiety is a fear of

something which remains unknown, which at the moment of experiencing it is unspecified, is in Kuwait, it's more of a sort

of free-form floating mood. It doesn't really have a definite target to latch onto. I think when

people are talking about things like unease, butterflies in my stomach dread, but it's not quite clear what they're scared of,

then they're experiencing anxiety. I recently gave this example to some climbers at a

climbing instruction class and I said when we're driving on our way to climb, we might be

feeling anxiety because I'm apprehensive of something. I'm not quite sure what it is.

Nothing dangerous is happening to me at the moment, but I am anticipating that something dangerous

might happen. The nature of the threat might even remain unspecified and unclified. So at that

moment, it has not turned into a fear. But if it turns into a direct threat, then it's fear. So, for example,

if I'm walking into a deep, dark forest, I have anxiety. But once, you know, the grizzly bear or the

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