Hotel Bar Sessions

Is "virtue" an outdated concept? And why is there a bear in this classroom?! This week at the hotel bar, Rick, Devonya, and Leigh are digging deep into the idea of virtue . What does it mean to be virtuous? How do we cultivate virtues? Are they timeless ideals or shaped by culture and history? We talk about Aristotle, sure, but we’re also unpacking modern critiques of virtue and asking how power a...

This week's episode is a REPLAY of a previously-aired episode from Season 9.  HBS will return with all new episodes on January 10, 2024. Stay tuned! The HBS hosts wonder how a hard heart is melted and mended. In a world often colored by misunderstandings, hurtful actions, and lingering grudges, the concept of forgiveness emerges as a beacon of hope and healing. For some, its transformative power t...

This week's episode is a REPLAY of a previously-aired episode from Season 9.  HBS will return with all new episodes on January 10, 2024. Stay tuned! The HBS hosts dig into Jacque Derrida's philosophy to see if it really is responsible for everything that's wrong with the world. There are very few philosophies that are blamed for so much as deconstruction. Introduced by Jacques Derrida in the late...

What if morality was law-governed in the same way as logic and physics? The Hotel Bar Sessions hosts close out Season 11 with a deep dive into one of philosophy’s most important moral principles: Immanuel Kant’s “Categorical Imperative.” They carefully unpack Kant’s three formulations of the “moral law”—the Universality formulation, the Humanity formulation, and the Kingdom of Ends formulation—to...

What if our cosmic unimportance is itself not all that important? This week, the Hotel Bar Sessions hosts welcome Joshua Glasgow , author of The Significance Impulse: On the Unimportance of Our Cosmic Unimportance , to unpack humanity’s seemingly irrepressible drive to seek significance and the societal and psychological effects of this pervasive impulse. Glasgow argues that the quest for cosmic i...

The HBS hosts survey theories of justice from the ancients to the present. What does it mean to think justice, to pursue justice, or to act justly? Are we servicing justice, or just serving our self-interests? How do different philosophical approaches help us imagine a “just” society? This week, we consider retributive, restorative, and distributive theories, among others, exploring how each shape...

What can the Indian dualist philosophy of Sāṃkhya teach us about matter and consciousness? In this captivating episode, we explore the fascinating interplay between matter and consciousness as articulated in Sāṃkhya, a key tradition of Indian philosophy. Joined by special guest Dr. Tuhin Bhattacharjee , whose expertise spans ancient Greek and Indian texts, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis, we c...

This week, the HBS hosts are joined by Dimitris Vardoulakis (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University ) to discuss the phronetic tradition and its significance for ethics, politics, and democracy. Drawing on both Aristotle and Hannah Arendt’s understanding of agonism in The Human Condition , Vardoulakis connects what he calls the phronetic tradition to human interaction and i...

What are the limits of the "human"? And what comes after us? This week, we’re taking on the big questions: What does it mean to be “human,” and is it possible we’re already moving beyond that? Starting with Foucault’s provocative claim that “the human is an invention… perhaps nearing its end,” we look at how history, culture, and technology have shaped—and continue to shape—our understanding of ou...

What do we mean when we say "Nature"? And what, if anything, is "natural"? In this week’s episode, we’re pulling up a chair at the bar to ask: What do we really mean when we talk about “nature”? From the world outside us—plants, animals, and landscapes—to the idea of human nature itself, we’re questioning our often contradictory and complex ideas of what counts as “natural.” Are we referring to th...

Are you there, God? It's us, Hotel Bar Sessions. This week, our co-hosts jump headfirst into one of philosophy’s biggest questions: "Does God exist?" Rick kicks things off by asking whether a final answer would even matter: would knowing God exists (or doesn’t) shift our lives and choices in any real way? Might belief in God itself just be a placeholder for the unknown? Why is the idea of an "Inte...

When is it right, or even necessary, to say "no"? Refusing can be a powerful act—whether it’s standing up to authority, rejecting harmful norms, or pushing back against injustice. But when is saying “no” the right thing to do? And what are the stakes when we decide to refuse? Often our refusals are quotidian and inconsequential, but sometimes, and sometimes without our knowledge, they’re huge. We...

Should we eat meat? Humans have been eating other animals for close to 2.5 million years--a fact that is evidenced by cut traces on fossil animal bones, surviving stone tools, and analyses of our ancestors' teeth. Does this evolutionary fact render meat-eating physiologically necessary and morally justifiable? Our ancestors did a lot of things to survive; is that sufficient reason to continue the...

What can Frantz Fanon and Friedrich Nietzsche teach us about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? This week, we're joined by Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College) to discuss the final chapter of his most recent book The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (Bloomsbury, 2024)-- entitled "Zionist ressentiment , the Left, and the Palestinian Question"-- which offers a fresh lens through whi...

Philosophy has traditionally associated the feminine with matter, implying passivity. Why? And to what ends? In our previous episode on materialism ( Season 6, Episode 83 ), we came to see that in more recent years, two, often related, forms of materialism have been developed: “new materialism” and feminist materialism. New materialism tends toward a philosophical reflection on advances in science...

Are we nearing the end of the "Age of Print"? And, if so, what comes next? The concept of "the Gutenberg Parenthesis" suggests that the era of print – which began in the 15th century, when the printing press was developed by Johan Gutenberg, and extended to the 20th century, when radio and television muscled in – was a unique period for human communication. However, as this week's guest Jeff Jarvi...

What counts as evidence? What makes it good or bad? How do we know? In court cases, the prosecution, plaintiff, and defendant present “evidence” that something happened or didn’t happen, that it happened in one way or another, that someone did something or did not do something. Evidence is meant to point to something as-yet undetermined. The same goes with scientific evidence, statistical evidence...

When did Jesus start hating immigrants and gays, and loving guns and capitalism? Many Christians on the political left today no longer recognize the Jesus of the political right in the United States. Despite sharing a text and history, (at least) two dramatically different versions of "Jesus" have emerged in contemporary American Christian discourse, each reflecting a set of moral and political in...

The HBS hosts struggle for recognition. [NOTE: This is a REPLAY episode, first aired on August 11, 2023. The HBS hosts will be back with new episodes for Season 11 starting on September 13, 2024!] 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 ent...

The HBS hosts ask Devin Shaw whether and how to punch Nazis. [NOTE: This is a REPLAY episode, first aired on Jun2, 2023. The HBS hosts will be back with new episodes for Season 11 starting on September 13, 2024!] Since at least the 2016 election the word fascism has emerged from the historical archive to contemporary political debates. This question has primarily been one about the identity of fas...

Welcome to the desert of the real. Hotel Bar Sessions podcast is predicated on the idea that the three of us meet up at bar, order-up some drinks, and then settle in to talk philosophy. But—spoiler alert—none of that is true. There is no bar, sadly there are not drinks, and the conversation takes place through the instrumentality of digital technology without us ever meeting up and being together...

Does voting matter? Voting is often heralded as the cornerstone of democracy, a fundamental right that empowers citizens to influence the direction of their government and society. Proponents argue that every vote counts, that it is through the collective decisions of the electorate that leaders are held accountable, policies are shaped, and societal change is enacted. They highlight the historica...

What happens when AI overtakes the role of human journalists? The HBS hosts are joined this week by Dr. Andrea Guzman , one of the leading experts in human-machine communication studies, to chat about the changing landscape of journalism in the age of artificial intelligence, where AI is not just a tool, but an active participant in content creation and distribution. We examine how journalism has...

Can queer theory overcome its ties to sexuality? Toward the end of the 20th Century, French Philosopher Michel Foucault called into question the ways in which a variety of practices, relations, institutions, and discourses came to be organized under the concept of "sexuality." The construction of sexuality as a thing, as a category, as a concept that seemingly identifies something crucial about us...

The HBS hosts dig into the crisis of academic peer review. Peer review, touted as the gold standard for ensuring research quality, has come under increasing scrutiny. Decades of studies have revealed surprising inconsistencies: from papers initially hailed as groundbreaking being rejected upon resubmission, to the current “retraction crisis,” to concerns about bias and subjectivity among reviewers...