Hotel Bar Sessions

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...

How might "oppression" be best understood as a "cage"? This week the HBS co-hosts take a deep dive into a true classic of feminist philosophy: Marilyn Frye’s 1983 article “ Oppression .” We unpack Frye’s understanding of oppression and argue about some of Frye’s more infamous examples, such as her claim that men holding doors open for women is sexist. Is she really correct that oppression can occu...

"Nostalgia" is a portmanteau coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer , combining the Greek nostros (homecoming) and algos (pain, ache).  Hofer was a medical student, and he invented this term to describe a kind of melancholia, a somewhat depressive state–- and so, from its inception, "nostalgia" was viewed as a mood disorder.  For the Romantics, it was a sentimentality for the past, the good old days of...

Bad arguments are nothing new, so why does it appear as if they have become so pervasive in public discourse?  When we watch so-called "debate" videos with titles like "Conservative professor DESTROYS woke student" or "Liberal pundit OWNS Conservative Senator," are we actually watching a rational debate? Is anyone learning anything in these exchanges? Or, as is most likely, are we watching the per...

This week’s episode takes Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification” and uses it as a diagnostic for late-capitalist life, not just for tech platforms but for democracy, higher education, and work more broadly. Our co-hosts unpack Doctorow’s three-stage model—platforms start out good to users, then pivot to serving business customers, and finally squeeze both users and customers to extract maximum va...

Many of us think of resistance as "protest," communicative acts aimed at fighting injustice, and done with others in public. But what happens when that kind of resistance isn’t possible or safe? When showing up, or waving a sign, or making a public speech might get you jailed, or silenced, or disappeared? Is it possible to resist oppression without following Western scripts surrounding protest? Th...

What does it mean to be “well-adjusted” in a society that might itself be profoundly unwell? And when we use therapy-speak to explain everything from bad relationships to bad politics, do we risk losing sight of moral responsibility for bad behavior altogether? Is self-knowledge even possible in a world built on historical and political denial? Grab a drink, get comfortable, and join us for a litt...

This week’s episode of Hotel Bar Sessions brings political theorist Laura K. Field (author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right ) into the bar to talk about the intellectuals cranking the rhetoric up to eleven while insisting they’re just “doing Great Books.” We follow the trail from Straussian seminar rooms and conservative think tanks to Trump rallies and “no kings” protests, askin...

The imagination has regularly been subordinated to  so-called "rational" or "scientific" models of thought. This week, we're joined by Stephen T. Asma (Columbia College, Chicago), who argues that imagination has deep, perhaps pre-linguistic, roots that ought to be recovered. What if we re-centered the powers of imagination, rooted in imagistic thinking and bodily gestures (like dance), instead of...

This week’s episode of Hotel Bar Sessions on the topic of comedy is a gut buster,  not least because one of your co-hosts pretends to be a stand-up comedian at night-- the only job for a philosopher that pays less than being an adjunct professor!  Comedy is a historically and philosophically rich topic, starting with primitive hominids drawing penises on cave walls. Our cohosts' begin with Plato,...

How do we choose the "hills" that we're willing to die on? Are we actually willing to DIE on them? If not, what would it take to convince us to climb back down the hill and compromise? This week , our co-hosts are digging deep into the question of our "deepest commitments," trying to find where there is room for compromise, and where the lines we draw are ultimately un-crossable. Full episode note...