Hotel Bar Sessions

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...

The HBS hosts cross-examine the courts. Former President Trump is currently dividing his time between the campaign trail and the courtroom. Some Americans are outraged by what they view to be targeted prosecutions by biased and overzealous District Attorneys, while others view the same events as a lifelong con man getting his just deserts. Fascinatingly, both sides seem to be putting a lot of fait...

For this "mini-bar" episode, HBS introduces our newest addition to the co-host gang, Dr. David Gunkel! David Gunkel is an award-winning author, educator and researcher, specializing in the philosophy of technology, with a focus on the moral and legal challenges of artificial intelligence and robots. He is the author of a number of important texts on emergent technology, media studies, and philosop...

The HBS hosts chat with Caleb Cain about his experience being radicalized by the Alt-Right internet. [While the HBS hosts are on break between Seasons, we're releasing REPLAYs of some of our favorite episodes from the past. This episode is from Season 5 and originally aired on August 22, 2022.] In June 2019, the New York Times featured a story about Caleb Cain, entitled “ The Making of a YouTube R...

The HBS hosts discuss the many and varied ways we lie to ourselves.   For our final episode of each season, we take up a text or concept in philosophy that has crept out of the discipline and made it into the wider popular consciousness and culture. This week, we're talking about Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea of “bad faith” ( mauvaise foi ) from his text Being and Nothingness . [ Trigger Warning: at aro...

The HBS hosts celebrate the paw-some impact of furry companions on our lives. Companion species, like dogs and cats, have been a part of human history for thousands of years. The first domesticated dog was over thirty thousand years ago, and the first cat over ten thousand years ago. So, much of what we call human civilization has always been a multispecies endeavor. In recent years, however, cats...

The HBS hosts take a break from the bar and lie down on the couch. Almost from the beginning of its theoretical elaboration and clinical practice, Psychoanalysis has had a profound impact on culture, particularly in the west. We all laugh at the idea that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!” And we speak freely of “Freudian slips.” And many are at least passingly familiar with the main concepts: E...

The HBS hosts look for the cause of the Golden Spike. The term “Anthropocene” was coined in the 1980’s, although it wasn't until 2000 that Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer suggested that we are living in a new geological epoch marked by the impact of humans on the Earth and its inhabitants. Geological epochs are determined by profound and measurable changes in the rock layers and changes in the fo...

The HBS hosts consider a case study testing the limits of academic freedom. Nathan Cofnas, holder of an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, is being threatened with losing his position because he is a “race realist” and, in particular, has stated that there is a difference in natural intelligence in people of different races. What is more, he has argued that race realism, if widely...

The HBS hosts discuss the style of "too late" capitalism with Anna Kornbluh.  Immediacy would seem to be the defining cultural style of our moment. From video to social media and from autofiction to autotheory, the tendency is towards direct intensity of experience and away from the mediations of form, genre, and representation. What drives this turn to the immediate in art, culture, and even poli...

The HBS hosts discuss the many paradoxes of ennui.  Most of our podcast episodes are about “big” issues, “interesting” topics, “provocative” conversations, or “important” matters… but the truth is that the overwhelming majority of our day-to-day lives is dominated by ennui. Boredom. Tedium. Lethargy. Lassitude. Or, in more common parlance, “the blahs.” Voltaire famously claimed (in The Prodigal So...

The HBS hosts discuss how the Luddites were right about why we hate our jobs.  The term “luddite” generally functions as an insult these days. It is something people are accused of, and a term that no one would claim for themselves. To adopt and adapt to new technologies is part of what it means to be progressive and modern, not to mention hip. However, the history of actually existing technologie...

The HBS hosts parse the difference between mistakes, half-truths, embellishments, and outright lies. George Costanza (from the TV series Seinfeld ) once insisted: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” This seems both true and false. It's certainly wrong to claim that someone lied accidentally, so intention, and therefore knowing what you are saying is not true, appears to be a necessary part of what...

 The HBS hosts consider the sands through the hourglass. It seems as if, when we’re young, the solution to all of our problems is just getting older— when will people take me seriously? when will I understand my own body? when will I gain the confidence to assert my own will? or, just be myself? Then, as we age, it paradoxically occurs to us that the only solution to our problems is to be young ag...

The HBS discuss Hegel, the black radical tradition, and the history of Philosophy with Biko Mandela Gray and Ryan J. Johnson. This week we are joined by Biko Mandela Gray and Ryan J. Johnson to talk about their book Phenomenology of Black Spirit, which reads Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit against the tradition of black thought from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis. It is a stunning demonstratio...

The HBS hosts discuss post-COVID demands to get "back to normal." In 2020 the NCAA canceled its basketball tournaments for the year. Over the next several months, mitigation measures became more widespread and strict. In some places more quickly than others, we all eventually “returned to normal.” Did we though? In some ways, normalcy seems to be an irresistible pull. But is “normalcy” not the sam...