Hotel Bar Sessions

Gilles Deleuze is multifaceted and his works seemingly heteroclite, which has made it difficult to assess what a “Deleuzian” philosophy may be, even if there are a host of philosophical concepts that bear his signature.  Most secondary works on him tend to approach him through one of his works on the canonical philosophers, arguing, for example, that Deleuze is and always was a Nietzschean or a Be...

We are living through the most intense public argument about gender in living memory, and somehow managing to conduct it without agreeing on what the most basic terms mean. The word cisgender — or just cis — is either standard vocabulary on HR onboarding documents and medical intake forms or, depending on where you live and who holds power at the moment, possibly a slur, possibly banned from gover...

Sports are one of the few remaining arenas of public life where tens of millions of people voluntarily agree to care about the same thing at the same time. As the World Cup reminds us every four years, sports can build identities, drive economies, organize civic loyalties, and transform old geopolitical wounds into something that at least resembles a game. Whether you played Little League, follow...

In the spring of 2026, Anthropic released to the public what it described as its most capable AI model to date... and then the U.S. government shut it down seventy-two hours later. That subsequent sequence of events, both strange and almost operatic in its timing, is the kind of thing we might genuinely call "unprecedented." It was also a crystalline illustration of something philosophers have bee...

We tend to think of art as something you look at — a canvas on a wall, an object behind velvet rope, something that holds still while you decide what you think of it. But a tradition in contemporary art has spent the better part of sixty years insisting that this picture is wrong. The artwork isn't the object. It's your body moving through the space it creates. In this minibar episode, Bob Vallier...

The HBS co-hosts are diligently at work prepping for Season 16 so, in the meantime, enjoy this "Minibar" episode from Jennifer Kling explaining the merits and demerits of employing Hanlon's Razor in our everyday lives! Full episode notes available at this link : https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/hanlons-razor --------------------- SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episod...

While our co-hosts are on a short break between seasons, enjoy this REPLAY episode of one of our favorite conversations from Season 15 with  Dr. Robert T. Valgenti , philosopher and professor at the Culinary Institute of America , who dropped by the hotel bar to chat with us about food, the “gastronomic event,” the ethics and politics of cooking and eating, and what it means to be human. Bon appét...

What does it mean to say that visibility is a trap? Why does the simple awareness that we might be watched work on us so effectively that we end up policing ourselves better than any guard ever could? And if disciplinary power now operates through every camera in every pocket and every satellite overhead, is there anywhere left that isn't already inside the panopticon? For the final episode of Sea...

Somewhere in the last forty years, quantification stopped being one tool of economic governance among others and became the whole operating system. Inside the firm, shareholder value crowded out almost every other account of what a company was supposed to be for. In macroeconomic debate, GDP figures got promoted from diagnostic instrument to final verdict on whether things were going well (never m...

So what exactly is an asshole? Is it a settled character type, or just a way of behaving that anyone might fall into on a bad day? Why does asshole behavior provoke us as it does, and why does it seem so much harder to resist now than it once was? If assholes are produced by social conditions (and they appear to be), what conditions produce them, and which ones might produce fewer? This episode ta...

What happens to a skill when you stop needing it? In this episode, we're talking about the quiet, subtle erosion that happens when technology simply takes over a task and the human capacity for it begins, almost imperceptibly, to fade. This is de-skilling: a phenomenon with deep roots in the history of labor and capitalism, newly urgent in an age of GPS, generative AI, and algorithmic everything....

Few topics generate more heat and less light than war crimes — and few topics deserve more careful philosophical attention right now. When a sitting American president has publicly threatened to destroy an entire civilization in a social media post and the language of "domestic terrorism" is being stretched to cover political opponents, the legal and moral categories we use to talk about what's pe...

Violence is everywhere right now... or is it? When you press people to define "violence," you'll often find that their grasp on the concept is slippery at best. We think we know what it means, but that certainty tends to evaporate the moment someone asks whether a slur counts as violence, or a system that denies you healthcare until you die counts as violence, or refusing to recognize someone's ex...

Philosophy has always been drawn to the question of what's possible, what could be, what might have been, and what we might yet become. In a political moment when the distance between the world as it is and the world as we want it to be feels especially stark, the tools philosophers use to navigate that gap — thought experiments, counterfactuals, ideal theory, and fiction — have never felt more ur...

The word "fascism" gets thrown around a lot these days, sometimes so freely that it starts to lose its edge. But what would it actually mean to develop a philosophy of anti-fascism, a sustained, rigorous intellectual framework for understanding how fascism takes hold and what might inoculate us against it? That question feels newly urgent in a political moment when the ideological infrastructure o...

We are living through a peculiar moment in the long, complicated history of humans and mind-altering substances. After decades of prohibition and stigma, psychedelics have staged a remarkable comeback — not just in underground culture, but in university laboratories, clinical trials, and mainstream news. Researchers are exploring psilocybin and MDMA as treatments for depression and PTSD, and a gro...

Philosophers have had many conceptions of the future–metaphysical, eschatological, ontotheological, dialectical, fatalistic, idealist, materialist, and more–and these in turn have been central to discussions of free will and determinism, freedom and constraint, hope and despair.  But our guest Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School, is against all of them!    For him...

There have been many reports in the last several years of a growing trend of estranged families in the United States. For those who make the decision to go "no contact" (or "low contact") with their family members, the response from non-family members can be a mixed bag of support and judgment... often independent of the person's reasons for making that choice. What’s going on with the contemporar...

This week, our co-hosts are joined at the bar by Dr. Robert T. Valgenti , philosopher and professor at the Culinary Institute of America to talk about food, the “gastronomic event,” the ethics and politics of cooking and eating, and what it means to be human. Full episode notes available at this link : https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/food --------------------- SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to a...

Anonymity is usually sold as a kind of freedom: the ability to speak without fear, to move through public space without being tracked, to test ideas and identities without immediate consequences. In this episode of Hotel Bar Sessions , the co-hosts pull up stools to ask whether anonymity actually liberates—or whether it more often dissolves responsibility. Starting with Plato’s Ring of Gyges (and...

Catastrophe usually sounds like a synonym for disaster—but in this episode, it’s treated as a philosophical concept: a “downturn” that scrambles a world’s legibility and forces a basic question— what can still be believed now? Starting from Greek tragedy (where catastrophe names a plot’s turning point), the conversation traces how ruptures—ancient, modern, natural, political—expose finitude and te...

What do we mean when we talk about intelligence —and who, or what, gets counted as intelligent in the first place? In this episode of Hotel Bar Sessions , our co-hosts pull up stools at the bar to tackle the idea of intelligence(s) as a plural, contested, and deeply political concept. Starting from a working definition of intelligence as the capacity to navigate a domain toward ends, the conversat...

Why do AI's fabricated memories "feel" so true? Hotel Bar Sessions is currently between seasons and while our co-hosts are hard at work researching and recording next season's episodes, we don't want to leave our listeners without content! So, as we have in the past, we've given each co-host the opportunity to record a "Minibar" episode-- think of it as a shorter version of our regular conversatio...

What happens when we follow the letter of the law, while refusing to cooperate with its spirit? Hotel Bar Sessions is currently between seasons and while our co-hosts are hard at work researching and recording next season's episodes, we don't want to leave our listeners without content! So, as we have in the past, we've given each co-host the opportunity to record a "Minibar" episode-- think of it...

What can the body, in pain, teach us about the hilarity of our own finitude? Hotel Bar Sessions is currently between seasons and while our co-hosts are hard at work researching and recording next season's episodes, we don't want to leave our listeners without content! So, as we have in the past, we've given each co-host the opportunity to record a "Minibar" episode-- think of it as a shorter versi...