Hotel Bar Sessions

The HBS hosts are joined by John Protevi to talk about case studies, COVID, and the political philosophy of mind. At first glance, a "political philosophy of mind" would seem to be an oxymoron of sorts. Minds, after all, are often considered to be the individual basis for decision and action, while political philosophy would demand that we think at least on some level in terms of collectivity if n...

The HBS hosts chat about the symbiotic relationship between cultural products and their fandoms. For a long time, the image of the fan and fan culture was summed up by an infamous skit by William Shatner on SNL , in which he implores the trekkies to “get a life.” To be a fan was to be a passive stooge of the culture industry, one who mindlessly buys its products, and memorizes its trivia at the ex...

The HBS hosts are joined by Will Paris to talk about Du Bois, public philosophy, podcasting, and carving out "problem spaces." In The Souls of Black Folk , W.E.B. Du Bois famously asked the question “What is it like to be a problem?,” highlighting the stigmatizing and dehumanizing treatment of Blacks in the post-Reconstruction but Pre- Brown v. Board of Education United States.  The purpose of his...

The HBS hosts discuss why humanlike robots are sooooo creepy. In 1970, a Japanese roboticist by the name of Masahiro Mori published a short essay in the journal Energy entitled “The Uncanny Valley," in which he attempted to explain humans' reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human.  Mori hypothesized that when we encounter humanlike technological objects, our feelings of affinity towa...

The HBS hosts discuss Jordan Peele's special brand of horror with the author of Stepford Daughters, Johanna Isaacson . For a long time, or at least it seemed, horror films were considered to be beneath serious scrutiny. The problematic politics of such films were all too apparent in the violence brought to bear on women’s bodies in countless slasher films. The racial politics were not much better;...

The HBS hosts ask Michael Hardt why we so quickly jump from the 60's to the 80's in our political imagination?  Most histories of the present either overlook the seventies, jumping from the sixties of radical struggle to the eighties of Reagan/Thatcher and repression, or dismiss it as just the end point of the previous era struggles, the point where the sixties fell apart, collapsing into infighti...

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 to mend relationships, free us from the shackles of resentment, and grant us the gift of emotional liberation make forgiveness a moral imperative. For...

The HBS hosts discuss a real human drama. Note to listeners: if you haven't already, you may want to watch “Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary” (link to complete film on YouTube here ) before listening! "Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary" tells the story of an annual competition held from 1992 to 2005 in Longview, Texas, in which a local Nissan dealership selected 24 contestants by lottery fo...

The HBS hosts confront the inevitable. It is most obviously true that we are all going to die. The very fact that anything is alive seems to entail that it is going to die. Death confronts us as an ultimate cancellation and nullification in the face of which one might ask, “what does it matter if I am going to die?”  The chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus says that the best thing is never to...

The HBS hosts chat with Justin Joque about how we might get Thomas Bayes' robot boot off our necks.  Why does Netflix ask you to pick what movies you like when you first sign on in order to recommend other movies and shows to you? How does Google know what search results are most relevant? Why does it seem as if every tech company wants to collect as much data as they can get from you? It turns ou...

The HBS hosts struggle for recognition. 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 entitled The Phenomenology of Spirit . It’s probably a passage that is referenced in a wide number of fields– psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, lite...

The HBS hosts discuss timing, prudence, discretion, and propriety. When we talk about propriety, there are a lot of “gray” areas, largely because propriety demands that we conform to conventional rules of speech or behavior… and “conventional rules” are often more the product of “convention” than they are actual “rules.” Propriety requires that we develop prudence and discretion, our capacities of...

The HBS hosts discuss the pros and cons of tenure. There are many good ideological reasons to defend tenure in higher education, not least of which among them is that tenure is perhaps the only institutional guard that society has established to protect its researchers, scientists, and intellectuals against the pressures of the market. That’s no small thing. But we also understand that, to the non...

The HBS try to decipher what makes prestige TV "prestigious."  The 21st Century hasn’t given us a lot of reason to recommend it so far—terror, war, fascism, plague, climate disaster, and an impending technopocalyps... but, hey, at least we’ve had good tv!  Often referred to as “Peak TV,” the so-called second (or “new”) Golden Age of Television began in the very late 90’s and really cemented its in...

The HBS hosts lobby for hobbies. The concept of hobbies is perhaps anachronistic and even ambivalent. Many hobbies are shadows of more respected pursuits such as the creation of art, music, or literature, and thus tinged with the idea of failure. Their primary function seems to be to pass the time. Every hobby risks being seen as not just an idiosyncratic activity, but a kind of failure as if that...

The HBS hosts celebrate our 100th episode by asking each other the question "what's YOUR philosophy?" Hotel Bar Sessions, as a podcast, is committed to the idea of "public philosophy," but is there such a thing as a “private philosophy"? Not private in the sense that it is kept out of the public, but private in that it is a philosophy that belongs to an individual.  As professional philosophers, w...

The HBS hosts try to determine who's in and who's out. In 1887, Ferdinand Tönnies published a groundbreaking book, Community and Society (an excerpt from his text that lays out the argument can be found here ), in which he argues that community is a different form of social group from society. The main distinguishing characteristics are that community is a group in which members are personally con...

The HBS hosts spill the tea about tales whispered, secrets shared, and reputations shaped.  Gossip seems like exactly the sort of topic that serious philosophers would wave their hands in disgust at, as not worthy of consideration. Hesiod, the ancient Greek poet, once declared, "Gossip is mischievous, light and easy to raise, but grievous to bear and hard to get rid of," and similarly, in Leviticu...

The HBS hosts chat with Nathan Duford about what men can (and can't) want.  Men, or rather masculinity, seems to be increasingly in crisis. This crisis takes many forms: incels (involuntary celibates who claim that they have been denied the sexual attention they feel that women owe them), volcels (so-called "voluntary celibates"), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW, who feel that relationships with wo...

The HBS hosts discuss culture wars, Midwestern housewives, and Kafka.   “Gate-keeping” is a term that actually originated in 1943, when Kurt Lewin coined it in his study Forces Behind Food Habits and Methods of Change to describe how Midwestern housewives effectively managed their families’ food consumption during World War 2. Housewives, who were the primary conduit for getting food from the mark...

 The HBS hosts ask Devin Shaw whether and how to punch Nazis. 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 fascism, what are its minimal characteristics? To what extent can the Trump administration be considered fascist, and so on? We discussed some of this las...

The HBS hosts ask: how do we know if we're getting where we're going? Recently, an article about four "hard problems" in philosophy and their possible solutions came into Rick's newsfeed. Upon reading it, his first question was whether or not philosophy is about "solving problems" at all, which immediately led him to think not only about progress in philosophy, but progress in general.  Some philo...

The HBS hosts consider the recent spate of assaults on academic freedom. As a public institution of sorts (and sometimes) the university claims to be neutral with respect to politics. This has imposed an ideal of seeing “both sides” of all issues. These two sides are supposed to roughly correspond to the two political parties. Such a model is arguably reductive and simplistic, forcing a particular...

The HBS hosts do NOT agree to disagree!   On the first day of co-host's Leigh's classes, she  warns her students against (what she calls) “lazy relativism.” The example she gives is of a conversation in which two people have been at odds for a while, they suspect that they are not going to come to an agreement on the matter at hand, and so one of them says: “yeah, agree to disagree” or “everybody...

The HBS hosts discuss Coppola's classic treatment of Nixon-era surveillance and paranoia. Released in 1974, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation is often hailed as one of the defining films of the post-Watergate era, a film dealing with surveillance, conspiracy, and paranoia. While it is definitely about that in many ways, it is also an interesting study of a particular kind of subject, and a p...