Hotel Bar Sessions: Recent Episodes
Leigh M. Johnson, Charles F. Peterson, and Rick Lee
The HBS hosts confront the inevitable.
It is most obviously true that we are all going to die. The very fact that anything is alive seems to entail that it is going to die. Death confronts us as an ultimate cancellation and nullification in the face of which one might ask, “what does it matter if I am going to die?”
The chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus says that the best thing is never to have been born at all. This is especially true if one’s life is filled with suffering and then death. Kant, not able to provide a reason why living is so great, simply says that it is the parents’ job to reconcile their children to existence! On the other hand, we have the 20th century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, arguing that we will only be authentically what we are when we take on our own death as the possibility that is the condition of our existence.
Co-host Rick Lee is fairly confident that death is "stupid." As he notes, when a loved one dies, our thoughts do not go to authenticity but to the fact that it sucks and is painful that there is now a hole, a gap, in my world that cannot possibly be made good again. It’s no wonder that people turn to the hope or wish that all will be made right again in the end. So, he asks: “what is death?” and what is the “meaning" of death?
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-87-death
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts chat with Justin Joque about how we might get Thomas Bayes' robot boot off our necks.
Why does Netflix ask you to pick what movies you like when you first sign on in order to recommend other movies and shows to you? How does Google know what search results are most relevant? Why does it seem as if every tech company wants to collect as much data as they can get from you? It turns out that all of this is because of a shift in the theoretical and mathematical approach to probability.
Bayesian statistics, the primary model used by machine learning systems, currently dominates almost everything about our lives: investing, sales at stores, political predictions, and, increasingly, what we think we know about the world. How did the "Bayesian revolution" come about? And how did come to dominate? And, perhaps more importantly, is this the best mathematical/statistical model available to us? Or is there another, more "revolutionary," mathematics out there?
This week we are joined by Justin Joque, visualization librarian at University of Michigan who writes at the intersection of philosophy and technology. He is the author Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar and, most recently, Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism.
Full episode notes available at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-78-revolutionary-mathematics-with-justin-joque
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts struggle for recognition.
The dialectic of lordship and bondage, more commonly known as the “Master/Slave dialectic,” is a moment in a much longer and exceedingly difficult-to-read (much less understand!) text by G.W.F. Hegel entitled The Phenomenology of Spirit. It’s probably a passage that is referenced in a wide number of fields– psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, literary analysis, any number of “area studies,” and even economics-- though very few of the scholars who reference it have slogged all the way through Hegel’s Phenomenology. Nevertheless, like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from the Republic and Nietzsche’s story about the lambs and the birds of prey from Genealogy of Morals, both of which we’ve discussed before on this podcast, Hegel’s dialectic of Lordship and Bondage manages to capture, in a concise and powerful way, something both intuitively true and yet, at the same time, utterly mystifying.
This week we ask the question, why has this passage become the hit single off of the dense concept album that is the Phenomenology.
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-105-the-master-slave-dialectic
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review!
Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
The HBS hosts discuss timing, prudence, discretion, and propriety.
When we talk about propriety, there are a lot of “gray” areas, largely because propriety demands that we conform to conventional rules of speech or behavior… and “conventional rules” are often more the product of “convention” than they are actual “rules.” Propriety requires that we develop prudence and discretion, our capacities of judgment, sagacity, and interpersonal awareness, which are arguably quite different from our capacity to apply a rule or logically reason from premise to conclusion.
Comics (perhaps the least interested in “propriety” among us) call this “timing,” and they spend years perfecting optimal joke delivery. When their timing fails, or when they can’t “read the room,” they bomb. Sometimes that’s the consequence of a deficit in their delivery– their rhythm, cadence, tempo, or pausing– but sometimes the joke itself fails. For example, in the months immediately following 9/11, most comics who joked about the attacks of that day were met with gasps and groans from their audience. "Too soon," the audience would heckle with the bad taste of “bad taste” in their mouths, too soon.
Today we’re going to try to unpack what “too soon” means, how we determine how soon is “too soon,” and whether or not there are, in fact, some “rules” of propriety.
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-104-too-soon
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review!
Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
The HBS hosts discuss the pros and cons of tenure.
There are many good ideological reasons to defend tenure in higher education, not least of which among them is that tenure is perhaps the only institutional guard that society has established to protect its researchers, scientists, and intellectuals against the pressures of the market. That’s no small thing. But we also understand that, to the non-academic public, tenure may seem like nothing more than a guarantee that haughty academics with cushy jobs can’t be fired unless, as the old adage goes, “they’re caught with a dead woman or a live boy”?
Who doesn’t want job security?
As with all things that we discuss on this podcast, though, the question of tenure is much more complicated that it appears at first glance. Once established as a institutional protection of academic freedom, the dynamics, significance, and real-world effects of the granting and/or denial of tenure have dramatically changed as the University, the culture, and the political intervention of state legislative bodies have changed.
In this episode, we’re talking about tenure: “get out of jail free card” or the necessary codification of a social good?
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-103-tenure
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review!
Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
The HBS try to decipher what makes prestige TV "prestigious."
The 21st Century hasn’t given us a lot of reason to recommend it so far—terror, war, fascism, plague, climate disaster, and an impending technopocalyps... but, hey, at least we’ve had good tv!
Often referred to as “Peak TV,” the so-called second (or “new”) Golden Age of Television began in the very late 90’s and really cemented its influence in the first decade of the 2000’s. The plots were complex and protracted, not episodic. The protagonists were antiheroes, not heroes, morally ambiguous, hard to endorse, but impossible not to like. There was foul language and graphic violence and full-frontal nudity. And since nobody could access this content with an antenna and tin-foil, we paid for it.
It’s since been dubbed “prestige tv,” in part (I think) to assuage the consciences of all those snooty people who looooooved to say that they “didn’t watch tv.” Prestige tv included shows you couldn’t not watch—not because you wouldn’t be “cool” or you might be left out of the most recent water-cooler small-talk, but because prestige tv was quite literally re-shaping culture itself.
The Sopranos. Lost. Mad Men. The Wire. Breaking Bad. House of Cards. True Detective. Game of Thrones. Atlanta.
Today we’re going to talk about prestige tv, in my opinion one of the most significant, and uniquely American, artistic movements since rock n’ roll. What makes prestige tv prestigious? How do we know it when we see it? What are some of the best examples of it? And, perhaps most importantly, why are we seeing less of it?
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-102-prestige-tv
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts lobby for hobbies.
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-hobbies
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts celebrate our 100th episode by asking each other the question "what's YOUR philosophy?"
Hotel Bar Sessions, as a podcast, is committed to the idea of "public philosophy," but is there such a thing as a “private philosophy"? Not private in the sense that it is kept out of the public, but private in that it is a philosophy that belongs to an individual. As professional philosophers, we often find that when were out in public and tell people what we do, they will often ask: "what's your philosophy?. So, this week, we're asking each other that same question.
What does it mean to have a philosophy of one’s own? Do each of the hosts have “a philosophy”?
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-100-whats-your-philosophy
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts try to determine who's in and who's out.
In 1887, Ferdinand Tönnies published a groundbreaking book, Community and Society (an excerpt from his text that lays out the argument can be found here), in which he argues that community is a different form of social group from society. The main distinguishing characteristics are that community is a group in which members are personally connected, relying on each other, close in worldviews and values, while society is impersonal, disconnected, with members that are independent and may not share values. (Think about small town vs. big city!) A debate subsequently arose in Germany about whether one was better than the other and Tönnies seems to have expressed more positive views about community than about society.
More recently, though, “community” has taken on a somewhat different resonance. We speak of the "queer" community/communities, the "Latin American" community, et al, and it seems we are referring to a group that has affinities in terms their members' interests and values, but may not be constituted by personal connections and direct relations.
For Tönnies, community appears to name a group gathered under the principle “we don’t do that here,” and therefore can be oppressive or repressive. Yet, today, community often indicates an association that is affirming and enabling.... even if that latter community can also, at times, turn repressive as a community calls one of its members a turncoat, or worse.
Today, we ask: is "community" the appropriate ground of politics? Or is it, rather, a menace to "society"?
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-99-community
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts spill the tea about tales whispered, secrets shared, and reputations shaped.
Gossip seems like exactly the sort of topic that serious philosophers would wave their hands in disgust at, as not worthy of consideration. Hesiod, the ancient Greek poet, once declared, "Gossip is mischievous, light and easy to raise, but grievous to bear and hard to get rid of," and similarly, in Leviticus, we find Moses warning his people with the admonition, "Do not go up and down as a talebearer among your people." Both remind us of gossip’s ability to captivate our attention, and the real harms it can inflict.
Yet, it’s not so easy to just dismiss gossip as mere frivolous chatter. Some evolutionary biologists link the emergence of language itself to gossip, and sociologists have long argued that the ability to engage in gossip played a vital role in our species' development, enabling us to form complex social networks, navigate alliances, and share information about others.
Gossip is not without its dual nature. It serves as a source of transmission for both amity and enmity. It can strengthen social bonds, create a sense of belonging, and forge alliances… but it also has the power to breed division, stoke resentment, and destroy reputations.
Is gossip a necessary, even essential, operation of human sociality? Is gossiping morally blameworthy in every instance, or are there instances in which gossiping is justified? What distinguishes “gossiping” from “reporting,” or “divulging,” or even just “communicating”?
Full episode notes at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-98-gossip
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts chat with Nathan Duford about what men can (and can't) want.
Men, or rather masculinity, seems to be increasingly in crisis. This crisis takes many forms: incels (involuntary celibates who claim that they have been denied the sexual attention they feel that women owe them), volcels (so-called "voluntary celibates"), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW, who feel that relationships with women threaten their masculinity), and Men’s Right Activists (who believe that everything from divorce laws to #metoo have made men a persecuted group). These crises and subcultures are often tied into the alt-right world, and at times have shown up in the screeds and manifestos of mass shooters.
What is up with men? Why is this happening? Joining us to answer these questions is Nathan Duford, author of Solidarity in Conflict: A Democratic Theory (Stanford UP, 2022) and researcher of the sexual politics of the early Frankfurt School.
Full episode notes at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-97-men-and-masculinity
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts discuss culture wars, Midwestern housewives, and Kafka.
“Gate-keeping” is a term that actually originated in 1943, when Kurt Lewin coined it in his study Forces Behind Food Habits and Methods of Change to describe how Midwestern housewives effectively managed their families’ food consumption during World War 2. Housewives, who were the primary conduit for getting food from the marketplace to their families’ mouths, recognized that not all family members’ need for food had equal weight in making household food decisions, and thus those wives (who would typically shop for and prepare the food) “gated” what food resources came in and how they were distributed. That is to say, the original meaning of “gate-keeping” wasn’t just about setting up gates to keep people out of some sphere in which they didn’t merit admission; it was about how to distribute scarce resources within an already-gated community in which there wasn’t enough for everyone. It was about survival.
Today, gatekeeping is not only not about keeping people alive, but one could argue that in many cases it’s about denying access to scarce resources– professional, interpersonal, political, economic– that people need to survive. Who are the gatekeepers and how did they come to be so? By what right? On what authority? Those of us sitting outside, trying to get in, want to know.
Full episode notes at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-96-gatekeeping
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
While the HBS hosts are taking a break between Season 5 and Season 6, we're re-playing some of our favorite conversations you might have missed. Enjoy this NSFW episode from Season 2, in which our co-hosts parse the difference between obscenity, profanity, and vulgarity. You can see the full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-20-vulgarity/
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, make sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
While the HBS hosts are taking a break between Season 5 and Season 6, we're re-playing some of our favorite conversations you might have missed. Enjoy this episode from Season 3 "Whose History?" (with special guest, Dr. Charles McKinney) and check out the full episode notes at this link: http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-31-whose-history/
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, make sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
While the HBS hosts are taking a break between Season 5 and Season 6, we're re-playing some of our favorite conversations you might have missed. Enjoy this episode from Season 4 on "Style" and check out the full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-47-style/
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast. You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts-- now, all four of them!-- chat about what podcasting can do for Philosophy.
There are roughly 2.4 million podcasts in existence right now, with over 66 million episodes between them, and recent studies show that 28% of Americans listen to podcasts weekly. Podcast genres are as diverse as human interests themselves; there are comedy podcasts, social and cultural podcasts, health and fitness podcasts, political podcasts, true crime podcasts (some of which have truly helped to solve crime!), and even a podcast entirely devoted to the pressing question: Whatever Happened to Pizza and MacDonald's?
A select few podcasts are wildly popular, with millions of weekly listeners, but the overwhelming majority of podcasts barely reach beyond their creators' close friends and family. (In fact, less than 25% of podcasts have 100 dedicated listeners/subscribers.) So why, oh why, does anyone need another podcast? Much less a philosophy podcast?
This week, HBS co-hosts Rick, Charles, and Leigh are joined by incoming (Season 6) co-host Jason Read to answer just that question. Podcasting seems to be the new frontier of what is sometimes called "public philosophy," and like all practices of public philosophy before it, philosophy podcasting comes with its own unique challenges and possibilities. We try to identify what podcasting is doing for and to the discipline of Philosophy, which philosophy podcasts we think are doing both Philosophy and podcasting well, what this new medium offers, and how we hope it might change not only how philosophy gets produced, but what philosophy gets produced.
Full episode notes available at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-75-podcasting-and-philosophy
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts reflect on four fantastic seasons with the inimitable Charles Peterson.
Co-host Charles F. Peterson has been the beating heart of Hotel Bar Sessions for the last four seasons. Throughout that time, he has pushed the podcast to be more and more expansive, in deeper and deeper ways, with his intellect, curiosity, and rapier-like wit. Charles was the mastermind behind many of our best episodes, the connection to some of our best guests, and the source of our most hilarious on-air moments. Unfortunately, though, Charles is being called away from the mic by his other commitments, and so Season 5 will be his last season as a regular Hotel Bar Sessions co-host.
Do not despair! Charles is staying on the HBS team, only now in a primarily off-air mode. He has graciously agreed to join us every few episodes for our "Afterthoughts" series, which will be available exclusively to Patreon subscribers starting in Season 6. (So make sure to sign up to Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here!)
We've dedicated this week's entire episode to celebrating Charles and his contributions to the podcast. We chat about some of our favorite moments together, and Rick and Leigh prod Charles to talk about his future plans. Although this is not, technically speaking, our "last dance" together, it's the last dance we'll have together in our regular hotel bar seats, so we're sending Charles off with all of the love and respect he deserves.
Beginning in Season 6, Rick and Leigh will be joined by our new HBS co-host Dr. Jason Read (@unemplyedneg), and Charles offers a few parting words of advice for his replacement as well!
Full episode notes available at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-74-the-last-dance
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts consider the possibility of sentient artificial intelligence with Dr. Regina Rini.
The debate about the possibility of emergent AI sentience has staunch defenders both for an against, many more people shrugging their shoulders in the middle, with many, diverse, and non-interchangeable lexicons being used to discuss this phenomenon. Today, we’re going to try to untangle those discursive webs a little bit with Dr. Rini, not so much to settle the question “Is AI sentience possible?” but rather “should we be concerned about sentient AI?” and, perhaps more importantly, what should our concern look like?
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-73-artificial-personhood
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts discuss legal personhood and rights for rivers, lakes, and mountains with Dr. Stewart Motha.
In most discussions about extending rights or legal personhood to non-humans, the focus tends to be on robots/machines or non-human animals. However, given our current global climate crisis, we have good reason to ask: isn't it time to devote more attention to the rights-- and perhaps legal and moral "personhood"-- of natural entities? What sorts of protections might be extended by the law if our notion of personhood were expanded?
This is not an easily answered question, of course, because natural entities still face the challenge of being accorded "legal standing" in order to bring suit in their own names. (Names that we humans have given them!) Some progress has been made on this front by organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, who have been granted the right of "representational standing" by various courts, but we're still a long way from practically negotiating our understanding of the difference between physis (nature) and nomos (law) in a way that actually protects Nature.
This week, we are joined by Dr. Stewart Motha, Executive Dean of Birkbeck Law School, University of London to discuss the challenge and potential promise of extending legal personhood to natural entities. Dr. Motha is the author of Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence (2018) and the editor of Democracy's Empire: Sovereignty, Law, and Violence(2007). His research explores the multiple forms and sources of legal norms (heteronomy) as a counter-narrative to liberal accounts of the autonomy of law, including challenges to the opposition between life/non-life. He is the host of the podcast COUNTERSIGNand can be found on Twitter at @MothaStewart.
Full episode notes available at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-72-the-rights-of-nature-with-stewart-motha
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts chat with A.O. Scott about the role and responsibilities of the critic.
The critic is frequently seen as a parasite who lives of the creative life of others but not producing a work of art through their criticism. In this episode, we are honored to be joined by A.O. Scott to discuss the role of the critic, the creativity of criticism, and the mutual dependence of art and criticism.
A.O. Scott is chief film critic (along with Manohla Dargis) for The New York Times. He also write for The Book Review as well as The Times Magazine. He is the author of Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth (Penguin Books, 2016). In addition, he is currently a distinguished professor of film criticism at Wesleyan University.
Full episode notes available at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-71-critics-and-criticism-with-a-o-scott
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts ask Dr. Linda Alcoff just how close to the edge of the bed is the United States sleeping?
A year and a half ago, as an angry, armed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building in what was, thankfully, an unsuccessful insurrection attempt, many of us watching the event unfold on television asked ourselves: is democracy itself in peril? This is, of course, a question we should have been asking for many years prior to Jan 6, 2021. And it is a question we should still be asking. At the federal level, an activist and regressive Supreme Court is aggressively chipping away at the rights of citizens, and an almost perpetually-stalemated Congress refuses to act on real existential threats (like climate change, COVID, and income inequality). At the state level, more than half of the legislatures have restricted voting rights, gun regulation, and protections for BIPOC, women, LGBTQ people, and the poor. States’ legislatures are busy gerrymandering districts, under-funding public education, over-funding police, and extending corporate welfare tax benefits carte blanche, while at the same time refusing to raise the minimum wage for workers, mitigate the affordable housing crisis, repair crumbling infrastructure, or exhibit even the most minimally-decent concern for the good of their citizens. Meanwhile, the average U.S. citizen is sick, indebted, demoralized, underinformed (or misinformed), and disillusioned. Why vote? Why care? What has democracy done for me lately? Today, we’re going to be talking about the peril(s) that democracy is facing, how we should think about them, and what, if anything, we can do about them.
We are honored to be joined by Linda Martin Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center. Prof. Alcoff is the author, most recently of Rape and Resistence: Understanding the Compoexities of Sexual Violation and The Future of Whiteness.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-70-democracy-in-peril-with-linda-alcoff
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts wonder whether the call is coming from inside the house.
Fear is a one of the most complex of human affects. It is both physical and psychological. It can be intensely private or shared by entire communities. It is sometimes paralyzing and other times exciting. Fear often seizes us without warning, but we can also "think ourselves into" being afraid.
What, if anything, distinguishes fear from dread or anxiety? How are fears managed or overcome? Why do so many people share similar phobias? Is there a logic to fear?
This week, we dig into the deepest, darkest corners of our own fears, and try to make some sense of why we never want to be there when something goes bump in the night.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-69-fear
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts chat with Caleb Cain about his experience being radicalized by the Alt-Right internet.
In June 2019, the New York Times featured a story about Caleb Cain, entitled "The Making of a YouTube Radical.” That piece was meant to highlight the subtle, severe, and devastating IRL effects of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which has been proven many times over to promote what (in internet slang) is called “red-pilling”—that is, the conversion of users to far-right beliefs. Today, we’re talking to Caleb Cain, a person who has been down the alt-right rabbit hole and somehow found his way back out of it, and we want to introduce our listeners to a first-person account of how right-wing radicalization actually happens on the internet, how it is sustained, and how it might be combatted.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-68-youtubes-alt-right-rabbit-hole
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts talk with Dr. Joel Michael Reynolds about what bodies are afforded and denied.
As we come to recognize more and more the occlusions that occur in, and often constitute, philosophy and its history, attention to an ableist presupposition in philosophy has come to the fore. Much as with feminist theory or queer theory or race theory, disability theory not only works to expose the ableist presuppositions of philosophy but also to alter philosophy for the better by the inclusion of the formerly excluded. Why are affordances-- social, political, moral, and physical-- made for some types of bodies, but denied to others? Have we yet grasped what different types of bodies can really do? What is the difference between a "disability" and an "impairment"? To what degree is our category "disability" more philosophical than it is corporeal?
Our guest for this episode, Dr. Joel Reynolds, is the perfect person with whom to talk about these questions and issues! Dr. Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Senior Advisor to The Hastings Center, Faculty Scholar of The Greenwall Foundation, and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program. He is the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society from Oxford University Press. In 2022, he published The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality.
You can read/download a transcript of this episode at this link.
Full episode notes are available at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-67-rethinking-disability-with-joel-michael-reynolds
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.
You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Kate Devlin to talk about social relationships between humans and machines.
When most people think about our future with robots, they tend to ask the following three questions: (1) Will robots take my job?. (2) Will they kill us?, and (3) Can I have sex with them?
This week, the HBS hosts are joined by Dr. Kate Devlin, Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London and the author of Turned On: Science, Sex, and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018). We talk to Dr. Devlin about the many variations of ethical, social, and sometimes sexual relationships we have with machines. What is the nature of our love, hate, desire, and envy of our robot companions? Why are we so often "creeped out" by them? And what might our para-social relationships with robots tell us about our own moral dispositions?
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-66-sex-robots
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.
You can also help keep this podcast ad-free by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts try to go viral with Andrew Baron, creator of KnowYourMeme.
Memes: if you get them, you get them... and if you don't, you don't. But how is a meme created? How does it spread? And how does it die? In this episode, we dig into the complex dynamics of memes-- on Dawkins' account, the most rudimentary units of social information-- to see how they do (and don't) imitate so-called "natural" processes in their generation, mutation, adaptation, and replication.
With our special guest, Andrew Baron (creator of Rocketboom and KnowYourMeme), we also investigate what, if anything, distinguishes an "internet meme" from other kinds of memes, and how internet memes may provide a unique insight into social operations and cultural formations.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-64-memes
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast. You can also help keep this podcast ad-free by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts investigate the limits of Reason alone and, more importantly, in real human history.
Many, rightly, understand the discipline of Philosophy as primarily defined by its commitment to Reason. But, what is “Reason”? Is it universal? Is it some kind of fundamental human capacity that transcends class, culture, politics, religion, or any other iteration of human difference? What do we make of the fact that, since the 17th C., inheritors of “European Enlightenment” thinkers unilaterally dictated the scope and limits of Reason for a broad swath of the world’s inhabitants?
Because, let’s be honest, the legacy of “European Enlightenment thinkers” is a complex and often ugly one.
In this episode, the HBS hosts try, at once, to both defend the privileged place that Reason has been afforded in Western Philosophy and to critique the capitalist / imperialist / colonialist logics to which that legacy has been put to use.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-63-reason
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast. You can also help keep this podcast ad-free by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts attempt to measure the real stakes of cheating.
According to a recent study, almost 60% of college/university students in the United States admit to having cheated at least once during their studies. Around 15% of U.S. students admit to plagiarizing intentionally and, of those, less than 1 in 5 is caught or punished for academic dishonesty. Professors regularly report that cheating and plagiarism is on the rise; many blame remote learning for what feels like a "plagiarism pandemic."
Meanwhile, plagiarism detection software has become BIG business, coercing academics to spend almost as much time surveilling and policing as they do researching and teaching. Who does this new, more martial and antagonistic focus on plagiarism help? And who does it hurt?
In this episode, we get to the root of higher education's commitment to academic integrity and its increasingly pathological obsession with cheating.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-62-the-plagiarism-pandemic
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast. You can also help keep this podcast ad-free by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr. to talk about what constitutes a "public intellectual."
Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr. is the James S. McDonnel Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University, and one of America's leading public intellectuals. He is also on the Morehouse College Board of Trustees. He frequently appears in the media, as a columnist for TIME Magazine and as an MSNBC contributor on programs like Morning Joe and Deadline Whitehouse with Nicolle Wallace. He also regularly appears on Meet the Press on Sundays. Combining a scholar's knowledge of history, a political commentator's take on the latest events, and an activist's passion for social justice, Glaude challenges all of us to examine our collective American conscience.
This week, the HBS hosts chat with Dr. Glaude about the role and the history of the public intellectual in America, the difference between the public intellectual and the "thought-leader" or "influencer," and what it takes to be a public intellectual in the 21st Century.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-61-the-public-intellectual
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast. You can also help keep this podcast ad-free by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.
The HBS hosts try to get to the truth of untruths.
Mark Twain famously claimed that there are three kinds of untruth: lies, damned lies, and statistics. In an age of widespread misinformation, where it has become considerably more difficult to distinguish between truths and lies, the HBS hosts make an impassioned plea for us to think seriously about what a lie is, what it is not, and why it matters. We consider the whole menagerie of falsehoods: from trifling fibs ("you look great in those pants!") to catastrophic lies ("the only the thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun") to seemingly antiseptic, but no less dissimulating, statistical misrepresentations.
This is our last episode of Season 4 and we want to send out a huge THANK YOU to all of our listeners! We'll be taking a couple of weeks off to detox, but Charles, Rick, and Leigh will be back with an exciting new slate of topics and guests for Season 5 starting on July 8!
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-60-lies-damned-lies-and-statistics
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions on Patreon at this link:
https://www.patreon.com/hotelbarsessions
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The HBS hosts chat with Dr. Ladelle McWhorter about the evolution of "queer" as an identity category and a verb.
Once only used as a slur with unambiguously negative valences, the noun "queer" has been reappropriated by (many) members of the LGBTQIA+ community as referring to a positive, even celebrated, notion of self-identity.... but the history of the term "queer" is complicated. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Ladelle McWhorter (University of Richmond) about that complicated history, including how "queer" as a social/political identity category may (or may not?) be in tension with its philosophical/theoretical use, including and especially the notion of "queer-ing" (verb) to indicate the very disruption of stable categories of identity themselves.
Our guest for this episode, Dr. Ladelle McWhorter, is the author of Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (1999), Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (2009), and Heidegger and the Earth Essays in Environmental Philosophy (2009). You can follow Dr. McWhorter on Twitter at @lmcwhort!
Full episode notes available at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-59-queers
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions on Patreon at this link:
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The HBS hosts discuss the where, when, and how of utopic imagination.
On the one hand, utopia as an ideal place, space, political arrangement, or future has been criticized because it delays action to some, perhaps impossible, future. On the other hand, something like utopia just might be necessary for political struggles. We begin with Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz and move on to discuss the importance, problems, and possibilities of utopia.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-58-utopia
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions on Patreon at this link:
https://www.patreon.com/hotelbarsessi...
FOLLOW Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/hotelbarpodcast
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FOLLOW Leigh M. Johnson on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/DrLeighMJohnson
FOLLOW Rick Lee on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/rickleephilos
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VISIT the Hotel Bar Sessions webpage here: http://hotelbarpodcast.com/
The HBS hosts sit down with Justin Weinberg of the Daily Nous to talk about philosophers on the internet.
While everyone is on the internet, many philosophers (some of whom may be on this podcast!) seem resistant to blogging, social media, and other forms of web presence. In this episode, we look at philosophers on the internet. What benefits does the internet bring to philosophy and/or philosophers? Is the internet our new “town square?” If so, should philosophy be brought to the town square? Another way to ask that is “should there be public philosophy?” and/or “should all philosophy be public?”. What are some better practices for being a philosopher online? Who are our favorite philosophers online and what are our favorite sites, Twitter accounts, YouTube channels, etc.? This week we are joined by Justin Weinberg, philosopher and creator/editor of The Daily Nous.
Full episode notes at this link:
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions on Patreon at this link:
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FOLLOW Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/hotelbarpodcast
FOLLOW Charles F. Peterson on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/c_fpeterson
FOLLOW Leigh M. Johnson on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/DrLeighMJohnson
FOLLOW Rick Lee on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/rickleephilos
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The HBS hosts chat with actor, dancer, and choreographer Blake Zolfo about what makes musical theater so unique.
What could possibly make musical theater important or relevant to three philosophers? We all love musicals! The affective appeal of musical theater is clear, even though there are those (philistines?) who do not find it enjoyable. Although Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Fine Art claims that opera puts text in the service of music, he also recognizes that the libretto of opera is the sole contributor of ideas, and therefore of properly human freedom. In musical theater, it might be that the situation is reversed: music is put in the service of the text. The HBS hosts are joined by Blake Zolfo (@blakezolfo on the socials) to talk about musical theater.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-56-musical-theater
Support Hotel Bar Sessions on Patreon here:
patreon.com/hotelbarsessions
The HBS hosts wrestle with Fukuyama's "Why National Identity Is Matters."
In this episode, we will focus on questions of national identity. In the U.S., the contemporary political moment is riven with competing ideas of what the United States is or are. These ideas are based in various ways of knowing including ideological, political, racial, and generational. Using Francis Fukuyama’s essay “Why National Identity Matters” we will explore fundamental questions regarding the origins of national identity, its definition, its mechanisms, and how these elements track through a contemporary lens.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-54-national-identity
Support Hotel Bar Sessions on Patreon here:
patreon.com/hotelbarsessions
The HBS hosts discuss the pervasiveness and perversity of algorithms in our lives.
Algorithms measure, and increasingly influence/determine, our behaviors. Yet, most people don’t know or understand what an algorithm is! Algorithms are essential to the logic of late capitalism and people need to understand them in order to work toward more ethical AI.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-54-algorithms/
Support Hotel Bar Sessions on Patreon here:
patreon.com/hotelbarsessions
The HBS hosts get to the bottom of what is real, what exists, and what is virtual.
In this episode, we take head on the question of whether an analysis, understanding, and assumption of reality, in other words, metaphysics, is a crucial task for philosophy. We argue about whether metaphysics should come before social and political theory, political engagement, and ethics. We come clean about our own positions on what is real. In short, we get real with reality.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-53-metaphysics
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patron.com/hotelbarsessions
The HBS hosts talk about the striving to live forever in physical, psychical, and social dimensions.
Immortality seems to be a spoken and unspoken obsession within contemporary culture, whether through the obsession with maintaining youthful looks through diet, exercise or, medical procedure or the hope for a future where people can live on as memories or even as digital intelligences. We talk about the underlying motivations for this hope, what it may say about the underlying dynamics of our culture in regard to existential/metaphysical concerns or the ways we struggle with certainty/uncertainty. How are these ideas examined in both popular and philosophical contexts?
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-52-immortality
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The HBS hosts unpack Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, Section 13, to uncover how we arrived at morality and moral subjectivity.
There are conditions that seem to be necessary in order for our whole moral outlook and values, conditions that are not found in nature. What must be the case in order for one to be said to be morally responsible? In this episode, we take Section 13 of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals as our guide to uncover the conditions of moral subjectivity.
Full episode notes available here:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-51-moral-subjectivity
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The HBS hosts look under the hood, inspect the engine, and try to figure out what drives us.
Perhaps more than any other affect, desire is put to work in so many areas of philosophy. For Plato, it is the beginning of knowledge (or the soul’s search for truth), for Augustine, it is what marks post-lapsarian humanity–“Our hears are restless until they rest in you.” For Hobbes, it is one of the root affects and, perhaps, the root of the war of all against all. More recently, desire has become a focus in feminist philosophy, Foucauldian “geneaology,” philosophies of race, and queer theory, just to name a few central directions. In this episode, the HBS hosts talk about desire.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-50-desire
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The HBS hosts discuss the role of memory in the constitution of human intelligence, subjectivity and culture/civilization.
As we age, we often lose the ability to retain our past experiences. In doing so, we seem to lose a part (or even all) of our selves. What is the role of memory in the constitution of human intelligence, subjectivity and culture/civilization? In this episode, the HBS hosts discuss memory and its relation to personal identity and social identity. This means that we also confront forgetting.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-49-memory
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The HBS hosts take the red pill.
Are we "living" in a computer simulation? What difference would that make? Why would it ever occur to anyone that we are in a simulation? In this episode, the HBS hosts discuss the hypothesis that we are just playing out another being's computer simulation.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-48-the-simulation-hypothesis
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The HBS hosts talk about style.
Style can simply mean a way of doing something, like dressing, decorating, writing, singing, painting. Often, it seems as if style is an “add on,” something not essential, and often seems closely akin to fakery (we can say someone is “all style, no substance”). But is there something more significant about style?
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-47-style
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The HBS hosts go where people know troubles are all the same.
In this episode, the HBS hosts discuss Bars—as a social, cultural and communal space, bars as a space removed from the regular function of society, yet at the center of essential social discussions. Why are we “Hotel bar sessions?” Let’s talk about the role the bar plays at conferences and why we say “this is where the real philosophy happens?” What does that say about the bar.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-46-bars
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The HBS hosts take turns in the "hot seat" as they fire questions at one another.
Can we be honest? Each week the HBS hosts say that one of us is in the "hot seat." But they never get "grilled." This last episode of Season 3, we grill one another through a series of questions. Some are rapid fire with the clock ticking down, some are "would you rather?" questions. And others we take some time to talk. Maybe it is a bit self-indulgent, but it surely will provide more insight into the lives and perspectives of the hosts!
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-45-turnt-up
The HBS hosts discuss The Godfather Trilogy.
The Godfather and The God Father: Part II often make it to lists of the best films. It can be argued The Godfather is America’s response to Shakespearean drama. The complexity of character, deft use of language, and the themes of the film interrogate fundamental historical, social and human concerns of American life.
Full episode notes at this link: http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-44-the-godfather-trilogy/
The HBS hosts discuss the nature, origin, and deployment of superstitions.
It seems as if superstitions just evidence a misunderstanding of the relation between some cause and some effect. So, training in critical thinking should help to allay superstitions… and, yet, it doesn’t. How important are behaviors to superstitions? Do superstitions require a belief in the supernatural? Are there harmless superstitions?
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-43-superstition/
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The HBS hosts talk about optimism and pessimism in its personal, political, and philosophical senses.
We tend to think of optimism and pessimism as personal, psychological characteristics. Betty White said that her secret to living to just so shy of 100 was that she never ate anything green and that she was a “cockeyed optimist.” But it seems as if there are non-personal, non-philosophical senses of optimism/ pessimism. There is clearly a political sense–can we work together to amass power to make the world, society, or a particular country better? Or is it all futile? There might also be a philosophical sense–can philosophy make individual or collective lives better or is it impotent?
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-42-optimism-and-pessimism/
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The HBS hosts discuss the ugly underside of tourism.
Tourism is a superficial activity that has deep historical and political underpinnings. In A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid argues highlights the power relation within tourism, where the tourist lives a life that allows them to visit the land of the (Fanonian) native. Tourism suggests privilege and power and a shaping of the world that makes a person a tourist. What other types of tourism are there? What are the other implications of being a tourist? What are the economic, political and even ethical ramifications of walking through the history and culture of others.
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-41-tourism/
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here:
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The HBS hosts talk about resolutions and the resolve behind them.
It is close to the start of a new year and at this time resolutions are in the air. But what is it to make a resolution? And if you make a resolution, do you have to also have the resolve to carry it through? And what is resolve? In this episode, let’s talk about resolutions and resolve.
Full episode notes at this link:
WEBSITE: www.hotelbarpodcast.com
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The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Jason Read to talk about how to understand work in the 21st C.
In this episode, Jason Read (Philosophy, University of Southern Maine) joins us to examine the Boots Riley‘s film Sorry To Bother You (2018) and what it might be able to tell us about the dystopic situation of the 21st C. worker. Why has it become so important that the worker demonstrate that they “love” their work? How much of our work demands “emotional labor”? Why is it necessary for (some) workers to abdicate their real or “authentic” voice in order to survive? How have we become so accustomed to accepting less and less, even as more and more is demanded of us?
Are workers in the 21st C. just a pot of boiling frogs?
Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-39-work/
The HBS hosts talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media.
Social media dominate much of our current lives. Sometimes this is for the better, sometimes this is for the worse. Social media platforms allow much that is beneficial to individuals, communities, and society. Yet they also allow much that is detrimental or even damaging. What is good about social media? What is bad? And what is downright ugly? We talk about who is helped by social media and who is hurt by it. We talk about its effects on our society. And we talk about why we use or don't use social media.
Full episode notes available at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-38-social-media
The HBS hosts talk about transcendence, the good kind and the bad kind.
Philosophers traditionally have thought of entities like God or Ideas as outside of or other than this world. At the same time, that transcendent reality is thought to be the cause or meaning of our reality. Is this the only kind of transcendence? Do we need transcendence? Perhaps politics and/or justice requires some notion of transcendence. Can we have a good transcendence without the bad?
Full episode notes available at this link.
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-37-transcendence
The HBS hosts discuss philosophy and theory in relation to the global south with Prof. Surti Singh.
We does it mean to theorize from the Global South? What tools can theory bring to the global south? And is there such a thing as The Global South? We talk with Prof. Surti Singh, the co-principal investigator of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s project “Extimacies: Critical Theory from the Global South” about these issues and what theorists in the global south challenge the “north” to encounter in its theorizing.
Full episode notes available at this link.
The HBS host discuss the criminal justice system’s failure to produce morally right outcomes.
The "not guilty" verdicts in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial made plain the often dramatic difference between what is legally permissible and what is morally permissible. In this episode, we talk about where that difference should be maintained and where it should be diminished or abolished.
Full episode notes at this link.
The HBS hosts discuss so-called “cancel culture” and the panic surrounding it.
For some, “canceling” is an essential tool of social justice. For others, it is a threat to free speech. In this episode, we try to identify what cancelation involves (de-platforming, boycotting, public criticism, shaming), what it doesn’t involve (actual silencing), and just how common it is (not common enough to constitute a “culture,” we think). Is cancel culture itself evidence of a moral panic, or is there a cancel panic being manufactured by the canceled?
In 2014, the #MeToo movement gave a name to the (long-practiced) practice of “calling-out” on social media. By 2015, “calling-out” had already evolved to “canceling.” Who are the cancelers? Who are the canceled? And how many different kinds of “mobs” are there on Twitter, anyway?
Full episode notes at this link.
The HBS hosts discuss the pedagogical pros and cons of thoughts experiments.
Philosophy has its own laboratory! While it doesn’t have graduated cylinders or Bunsen burners, it is a “clean room” in which philosophers can distill the essential elements of a theory. We talk about the pros and cons of thought experiments, their uses, and their abuses. We give some examples of famous thought experiments and, yes, we talk about the trolley problem.
Full episode notes at this link.
The HBS hosts wonder whether there is a uniquely "American" form of Christianity.
There are more than 2.3 billion Christians in the world, and 205 million of them live in the United States of America. Is there an identifiable strain of Christianity that is unique to the U.S.? If so, what are its dominant characteristics? How closely does it adhere to-- or how far does it stray from-- the basic tenets of Christianity?
In this episode, the HBS hosts take a hard look at some of the more curious features that seem to characterize Christianity in America-- the church-as-corporation model, the prominence of "prosperity gospel," the conflation of God and Country, and the widespread antagonism toward immigrants, LGBTQ persons, the poor, and others.
Full episode notes at this link.
The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Charles McKinney, Jr. to talk about whose history is (and isn't) being taught.
Following on the heels of a recent and very contentious political debate over the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, we invited Dr. Charles McKinney, Jr. (Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of History at Rhodes College) to sit for a few rounds at the hotel bar as we explore the dynamics of power, liberation, and Truth as they play out in the teaching of history.
Full episode notes available at this link.
The HBS hosts discuss how robots and intelligent machines are upending our social, moral, legal, and philosophical categories.
For this last episode of Season 2, the HBS hosts interview Dr. David Gunkel (author of Robot Rights and How To Survive A Robot Invasion) about his work on emergent technologies, intelligent machines, and robots. Following the recent announcement by Elson Musk that Tesla is developing a humanoid robot for home use, we ask: what is the real difference between a robot and a toaster?
Do robots and intelligent machines rise to the level of “persons”? Should we accord them moral consideration or legal rights? Or are those questions just the consequence of our over-anthropomorphizing robots and intelligent machines?
Full episode notes available at this link.
The HBS hosts present their best defense of humanities-based education and, in doing so, try to justify their existences.
As higher education has become more corporatized and STEM-focused, areas of study are often "pitched" to students on the basis of their future income-earning potential. However, college students now are entering a workforce where more than 30% of available jobs will be automated before those students reach middle age. Today's college students need more than vocational training to prepare them for the future they are entering.
Most academics can (and do) make the argument for the intrinsic value of the humanities-- that it helps shape us into good citizens and moral agents-- but are there other defenses available? Does a humanities-based education also have instrumental value? How do you get a job with a History or Philosophy or Anthropology degree? Is humanities-based education for everyone, or is it elitist?
Full episode notes at this link.
The HBS hosts discuss whether or not generational tags– “Boomer,” “GenX,” “Millennial,” and “Gen Z”– are useful descriptions or just gerrymandered groups.
Are you Gen Z, a Boomer, Gen X? We don’t know either but in this episode Dr. Rick Lee leads a discussion to try to figure out whether these generational designations have any stable meaning. Do they make sense as organizational categories. Are they Objective Types, Natural Kind, or Gerrymandered Sets? Do generational markers say more than gender, racial, class, ability in terms of identity? We ask about the dates of generations, the characteristics of generations and generational self-consciousness.
Full episode notes at this link
The HBS hosts discuss scams, cons, gig work, and what drives us to live and work at full speed.
In the immortal words of Clifford Joseph Harris, Jr. (aka, T.I.) "If you don't respect nothing else, you will respect the hustle." In this episode, Dr. Leigh M. Johnson takes the lead in an analysis of how "the hustle," in all senses of that term, define our lives today. We look at the HBO docuseries Generation Hustle-- which tracks the stories of 10 young scammers, con-artists, and/or sociopaths-- before trying to pinpoint the economic and social conditions that make these kinds of hustles so appealing to GenY and GenZ. Then, we turn to the "side-hustle" (gig work), an increasingly necessary hustle in the lives of workers across generations. Finally, we ask: why are we working so hard and in such a hurry all the time?
Full episode notes available at this link.
The HBS hosts talk about music, mathematics, groove, and "altar calls."
Dr. Charles Peterson takes the lead in this week's discussion of the power of music in our lives. After a quick run-down of each co-host's own musical likes and dislikes, the HBS gang jumps right into a consideration of the effect that music has on us both as individuals and collectively. Does music give us some singular insight into what it means to be human? What does music evoke within us? How does it seem to have the power to inspire, to sadden, to terrify, and to comfort? How can it be used to manipulate? Is music a key to understanding the order of the Universe? Is it a universal language? And, if music is a common "human" denominator, how do we explain people who have no rhythm, who are "tone-deaf," or why our musical tastes vary so widely?
Full episode notes available at this link.
The HBS hosts try to figure out why there are 150 guns for every 100 Americans.
In the midst of a pandemic, as COVID-related deaths creep closer towards 1 million, it's easy to forget the other public health epidemic plaguing the United States, namely, gun violence. Nearly 10,000 people had already been killed by gun violence by June of 2021, with no sign of slowing numbers. Schoolchildren regularly practice "active shooter" drills and, in states like Tennessee, gun-control laws have been relaxed so much that they are practically non-existent. A study published earlier this year shows that gun suicides are rising steeply in 2021, including among teenagers and children.
Between January 1 and August 31 of 2021, there were 242 days. A mass shooting occurred in the United States on all but 44 of those days.
How did we get here and who have we become? Who is suffering the most from gun violence in our country, and who is most guilty for gun deaths? Is the Second Amendment's guarantee that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" been interpreted too loosely? Should the Second Amendment be repealed? In this episode, we take a close look at all of those questions, as well as Dr. Carol Anderson's new book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.
Full episode notes available at this link:
The HBS hosts discuss academic specializations and how to make the humanities more inclusive.
Over the last several decades, there has been a long-overdue push for professors in the humanities to diversify their curricula to include more women, BIPOC, queer, disabled, and other under-represented thinkers and texts. Yet, the “add diversity and stir” model for syllabus design in many ways fails to address a lot of the problems that motivated this demand in the first place. It isn’t just syllabi in the humanities that have a diversity problem, it’s the humanities professoriate itself.
First, academics from traditionally dominant demographic groups– white, male, straight, non-disabled, and middle-to-upper class– ought not presume that their academic training has necessarily equipped them with the knowledge, skills, or understanding to simply “take up” an unfamiliar field of specialization with the same level of knowledge, skill, and understanding as a specialist in that area possesses. Second, pressuring the current professoriate to “add diversity and stir” tends to de-emphasize the need for universities and individual departments to hire faculty from traditionally under-represented demographics with specialized training in the needed areas. BUT… third, we must be careful not to assume that every person’s scholarly specialization mirrors their personal identity.
How can we think about strategies for diversifying both the curricula and the faculty in humanities fields without reproducing the same prejudices that have made the humanities so non-diverse?
Full episode notes available at this link.
The HBS hosts discuss the role of superheroes in culture and popular media.
In American graphic fiction and contemporary film, the superhero stands at the center of many popular narratives. Superhero stories published by DC Comics and Marvel are a multi-million dollar per year industry and, in 2019 alone, superhero movies grossed 3.19 billion dollars in revenue. Although it may seem to the novice as if these publishing houses and film studios just recycle the same stories (and sequels) over and over, connoisseurs of the genre know that the figure of the "superhero" has changed and evolved dramatically over the last half-century. What does the figure of the superhero represent? Who does it serve? How has it adapted to reflect broader cultural, political, and social changes?
In this episode, Dr. Charles F. Peterson-- a bona fide connoisseur of comics and superhero films-- schools his novice co-hosts on the nuances of superheroes and their development, as well as the deep and often profound philosophical truths that they help to reveal about us ordinary (not super and not heroic) humans.
Check out the full episode notes at this link.
The HBS hosts take a critical look at the white working class and their grievances.
Leading up to the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, and even more so afterwards, the U.S. found itself inundated with analyses of the allegedly “overlooked” grievances of the white working class. Were those legitimate grievances that should have been affirmed and addressed? Who belongs to the WWC in America, anyway? Do they share a “class consciousness” in the traditional Marxian sense, or are they primarily identifiable by their shared Whiteness? Are there multiple iterations of the “white working class” ? And, if so, are the many WWC’s compatible?
Dr. Rick Lee is in the hot seat for this episode’s deep dive into the definition, evaluation, and analysis of the white working class, who are clearly (in Rick’s estimation) “lashing out” these days.
Full episode notes available at this link: http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-22-white-working-class/
The HBS hosts discuss conspiracy theories and what motivates people to believe in them.
The word "conspiracy" derives from the Latin con- ("with" or "together") and spirare ("to breathe"), and it seems like more and more people are breathing in the thin air of dubious explanations and bonding together over them. From Q-Anon to flat earthers to anti-vaxxers to climate change deniers to people convinced that a pedophilic, blood-drinking, sex-trafficking, deep state cabal is orchestrating our lives, conspiracy theories have captured the hearts and minds of many in the 21st C. United States. Is this new? Should we worry? And what really happened to Jeffrey Epstein?
Leigh M. Johnson take the lead in this episode's conversation and, together with co-hosts Rick Lee and Charles Peterson, tries get to the bottom of what motivates people to believe in conspiracy theories. We take a brief tour through the history of conspiracy theories before getting to their benefits (making the world seem to make sense) and harms (too many to list), and then confronting the 800lb internet gorilla: QAnon. We also try to tease out the difference between believing in a conspiracy theory and "conspiratorial thinking," and we consider what Thi Nguyen's thoughts on echo chambers and epistemic bubbles might tell us about conspiracy theorists.
Full episode notes available at this llnk.
The HBS hosts lower themselves into the muck in this NSFW episode.
Dr. Charles F. Peterson is in the hot seat for this episode’s discussion of vulgarity. What is the difference between obscenity, profanity, and vulgarity? Who determines what is “appropriate”? Is the very concept of vulgarity elitist?
Full episode notes available at this link.
In advance of Rick Lee’s forthcoming book on laughter, co-hosts Charles and Leigh ask him why he thinks all “theories” of comedy are inadequate. What exactly is the “joke” part of a joke? Is comedy fundamentally formulaic or does it escape systematic analysis? What is happening when we laugh together– as the HBS co-hosts do a lot in this episode!– and how does laughter connect us to other people?
John Chrysostom once warned that “laughter often gives birth to foul discourse” and the HBS hosts are determined to prove him right in this episode. Definitely pour yourself a drink before sitting down to listen to this conversation, because it’s a helluva lot of fun!
Check out the full episode notes at this link.
Co-host Leigh M. Johnson is in the hot seat for this episode's discussion of digital afterlives. If we consider the "digital," information-based self to be distinguishable from the meatspace self, we should ask: how long can the Digital Me live on after my meatspace body dies? Technology already enables us to "re-animate" archives of personal information in many ways, and some futurists believe that we may, someday, be able to upload our consciousnesses to the cloud. Who owns that information? What are they currently allowed (or not allowed) to do with it? What would happen if we insisted that all of our information being "deleted" after we physically die?
Whether or not you believe in a Heaven or Hell, all of us need to think more seriously about our digital afterlives. Rick, Charles, and Leigh work through some of that thinking-- and much more-- at the hotel bar!
Check out the links below to learn more about thinkers and ideas referenced in this episode:
- Maggi Saven-Baden and Victoria Mason-Robbie, Eds., Digital Afterlife: Death Matters in a Digital Age (2020)
- Rebecca Skloot, The Immoral Life of Henrietta Lacks (2011)
- origin of the term "meatspace"
- A visualization of the length of Terms of Service for 14 popular apps
- Tupac hologram performs with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre at Coachella 2012
- "Facebook told to grant grieving mother access to daughter's account" (The Guardian, 2011)
- Black Mirror episode "Smithereens" (on IMDB, or watch the episode on Netflix)
- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message (2001)
- "Everything You Need to Know About Twitter Direct Messages" (Livewire, 2020)
- What is data anonymization?
- "What Really Happens To Your (Big) Data When You Die?" (Forbes, 2017)
- "What Happens to Your Email and Social Media After You Die?" (MoneyTalks, 2020)
- "What Happens To Your Medical Data After You Die?" (The Medical Futurist, 2021)
- What is commodity fetishism?
- U.S. House of Representatives' antitrust report on Big Tech
- Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory" (1988)
- What is content curation?
- "Computerized job interviews: Artificial intelligence algorithm may judge you, determine whether you get hired" (Chicago Tribune, 2021)
- "Google's Grand Plan to Eradicate Cookies is Crumbling" (Wired, 2021)
- How to recognize a phone scam
- "Black women, AI, and overcoming historical patterns of abuse" (VentureBeat, 2021)
- "Black and Queer AI Groups Say They'll Spurn Google Funding" (Wired, 2021)
- Nick Bostrom, "Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up" (2006)
- HBO series Years and Years
- "The race to stop ageing: 10 breakthroughs that will help us grow old healthily" (Science Focus, 2021)
- Anne Rice, The Vampire Chronicles
Check out this episode on the HBS website here.
This episode explores the political and ethical dimensions of the category of “citizen”. In anticipation of his soon-to-be-released book Beyond Civil Disobedience: Social Nullification and Black Citizenship (August, 2021), Charles sits down in the captain's "hot" seat for this episode's discussion of the limits of citizenship, the failure of the state, and the construction of new categories of political, social and civic identity. Millions of people have taken to the streets in protest over the last decade. What are the questions those citizens are asking about the failures of their government? What do these protests say about how we think about the relationship between individuals and their communities, and the relationship of those communities to the State? How can we develop a more robust conception of engaged, healthy, responsible, and critical citizenship?
"The people who are protesting have an amazing, although critical, view of the reality of citizenship, but they also have a very optimistic, idealistic sense of what citizenship should be. I think moving into the streets shows an amazing investment in what the society can be, an investment in trying to get the apparatuses of power to live up to the rhetoric of democracy and freedom and what it means to be a citizen in this type of state."
= Charles F. Peterson
Full episode notes available at this link.
The HBS hosts discuss how cities, once considered hubs of public life and interaction, have become increasingly segregated, partitioned, disconnected, and privatized.
Drawing on his experience using the city of a Chicago as a classroom, Rick Lee asks: can we identify the material markers of "privatization" in contemporary cities? How do we know which parts of the city are for "us," which parts of the city are for everyone, and which parts aren't? Is there anything like a "public commons" anymore and, if so, where is it? What can we learn from the fact that even park benches and bus stops are physically-engineered to prevent the unhoused from being able to find rest or shelter? How might we build a more just city?
Full episode notes at this link.
Is the world in itself a mystery that science and philosophy take different routes to try to solve? How do luck, logic, empirical investigation, and intuition all work together to make sense of the world? What would a solution even look like? Are philosophers basically just detectives? Is a crime requisite to initiate investigations in mysteries? Is the unknown connected to Aristotle’s idea that philosophy begins in wonder? Is the mystery genre mostly a battle of reason over unreason?
Full episode notes at this link.
The HBS hosts talk about love. What is love? Is it a feeling? Is it a cosmic or metaphysical force? Is it a primary motivating drive to propagate the species or to create ideas? What happens when love goes wrong?
Full episode notes at this link.
The HBS hosts chat about our impending doom. Is the apocalypse nigh? Will it be environmental, political, technological, or biological? Can we imaging human beings existing in 50 years? 100 years? 5000 years?
Full episode notes at this link.
The HBS hosts take a look at the political, philosophical, cultural, and personal dimensions of nostalgia.
Full episode notes at this link.
For Episode 6, the HBS hosts take a look at several of the metrics by which we are rated and ranked. We talk about grading, student evaluations, the Philosophical Gourmet Report (in professional Philosophy), social media algorithms, China's social credit systems, and we delve into some of Cathy O'Neal's arguments in Weapons of Math Destruction.
Full episode notes at this link.
For Episode 5, the HBS hosts consider the last year living with COVID: what can we not believe that we did before COVID? what can't we wait to get back to doing? and what do we hope we never go back to doing?
Full episode notes at this link.
For Episode 4, the HBS hosts look into the stories we tell, whether or not they are true, and what happens when those stories fall apart. Specifically, they discuss the various ways that origins are grounded in myths, documents, and self-narratives. By way of access into these problems, they take on the new Netflix series, Murder Among the Mormons, which centers around the story ofMark Hoffman, a master forger and murderer. What does it mean to have a physical document versus an oral tradition? How much of any given origin is truth or fiction and how do we know? How does authority function in the anchoring of any given origin story and its propagation?
Full episode notes at this link.
For Episode 3, Leigh M. Johnson is in the hot seat to explain why philosophers should be thinking more about emergent technologies. Co-hosts Shannon and Ammon make her seat hotter with questions about what counts as "intelligence," how close we are to the Singularity, whether robots will have feelings or should have rights, and which emergent technologies we should be excited (and worried) about in the near future.
Full episode notes at this link.
For Episode 2, Ammon Allred is in the hot seat to explain how thinking about aesthetic experience more seriously can free us from the hold of normativity. Co-hosts Leigh and Shannon make his seat hotter by forcing him to listen and respond to an atonal polka rendition of The National Anthem and then asking questions about what counts as art, what aesthetic experience does for us, whether or not none-human animals and machines can produce art (or have aesthetic experiences), and karaoke.
Full episode notes at this link.
For our first episode of HBS, Shannon Mussett is in the hot seat to explain how the existentialist conception of freedom remains useful and important for Philosophy. Co-hosts Ammon and Leigh make her seat hotter with questions about how "radical" human freedom is, whether or not it is an illusion, why Shannon feels the urge to spontaneously drop babies, and the possibility of freedom for non-human animals, Nature, or machines.
Check out the full episode notes at this link.