Hotel Bar Sessions

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...

Ideology is said in many ways. Which one is emancipatory? This week, we are joined by Dr. William Clare Roberts , Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University, to discuss his recent essay "Ideology and Self-Emancipation: Voluntary Servitude, False Consciousness, and the Career of Critical Theory." This is the second part in our "Ideology" series. You can listen to the first part (...

The ocean and space and "Ode to Joy" are sublime, of course... but what about an excellent lentil soup? In a confusing twist of etymology, where one would expect "sub" to mean "below," in the word "sublime" it indicates something above or even beyond. We use it as a superlative, but a superlative of what? Edmund Burke argues that the experience of sublimity is related to fear in the extreme, even...

What motivates people to live off-grid in the 21st C? And how hard is it to survive out there? This week, the HBS hosts are joined by journalist and co-host of the Our Uncertain Future podcast Eric Mack , who decided in 2020 to move his family "off-grid." Currently residing in a 100% water- and energy-independent compound in the New Mexico desert, Eric chats with us not only about the skills and r...

What, if anything, is the difference between having ideological commitments and belonging to a "cult"? This week's episode is a "deep dive" into the very deep waters of ideology and ideological commitments. A couple of important notes for listeners: first, this episode was recorded the day before William Clare-Roberts' excellent essay "Ideology and Emancipation: Voluntary Servitude, False Consciou...

The HBS hosts wonder whether ChatGPT is the least of our worries.  Generative Ai is a still new and emergent technology capable of producing not only text that could be mistaken as human-generated, but also images, video, music, and "voice." For all of the amazing opportunities opened up by generative AI, however, it does not come without its own risks. Secondary and post-secondary education, for...

The HBS hosts are not here to make friends. They’re here to WIN. We all have our low-brow guilty pleasures and, for millions of Americans, one of those is reality TV. Only a few months ago, amidst a war raging in the Ukraine, a new regent being crowned in the U.K., and reproductive rights being stripped from women here in the U.S., the whole of the internet was talking about only one thing: “ Scan...

The HBS hosts discuss how friendships are forged, maintained, and sometimes broken. In The Politics of Friendship , Jacques Derrida invokes a statement originally attributed to Aristotle: “My Friends, there are no friends," capturing something that seems to be fundamental about friendship. Friendship is essential to human thriving, but also difficult, if not impossible, to attain and maintain.  We...

What is a person? What is a thing? And what difference does that difference make?  Although we tend to use the terms "person" and "human being" interchangeably, it hasn't always been the case that all human beings were considered (moral or legal) persons, nor is the case today that all persons are human beings. Here in the United States, corporations are considered legal persons, and in several co...

What's so special about originality? Today, originality is being challenged in so many ways: comedians “stealing” jokes, cultural appropriation, remixes, not to mention the myriad ways that generative artificial intelligence has made plagiarism of all kinds possible. We  value originality over imitation, creativity over copying, and novelty over the “same old, same old.” But, why is originality su...

Michael Norton explains why “Joe Versus the Volcano” is the perfect existentialist film. Continuing our tradition of going to the movies for the first episode of teach new season, we watch the 1990 film Joe vs. The Volcano with Michael Norton from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Michael has an argument that the movie is the perfect existentialist film. Is he right? Full episode notes avai...