Hotel Bar Sessions

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...

While the HBS hosts are taking a break between Seasons 6 and 7, we're re-playing some of our favorite conversations you might have missed. Enjoy this REPLAY episode from Season 5 on "The Public Intellectual" with special guest, Eddie Glaude, Jr. Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr . is the James S. McDonnel Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton Un...

While the HBS hosts are taking a break between Season 6 and Season 7, we're re-playing some of our favorite conversations you might have missed. Enjoy this NSFW episode from Season 2, in which our co-hosts parse the difference between obscenity, profanity, and vulgarity!  Full episode notes at this link : http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-20-vulgarity/ ---------------- If you enjoy Hotel...

The HBS hosts are on break between Seasons 6 and 7, so we're REPLAYing our Season 5 episode on "YouTube's Alt-Right Rabbit Hole." In this episode, we interview Caleb Cain ( @FaradaySpeaks ) about his experience of being radicalized by the al-right internet. n June 2019, the New York Times featured a story about Caleb Cain, entitled “ The Making of a YouTube Radical .” That piece was meant to highl...

The HBS hosts are on break between Seasons 6 and 7, so we're REPLAYing our Season 2 conversation with David Gunkel about robots and robot rights. The HBS hosts interview Dr. David Gunkel (author of Robot Rights and How To Survive A Robot Invasion ) about his work on emergent technologies, intelligent machines, and robots. Following the recent announcement by Elson Musk that Tesla is developing a h...

The HBS hosts consider the merits and demerits of the red pill/blue pill option. The Allegory of the Cave (a section from Plato's longer dialogue entitled Republic ) is one of the most famous and widely referenced passages in the history of Western philosophy. Many, even those who are not "professional" philosophers, are at least noddingly familiar with Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Yet, those who...

In a passage that could be considered the motto of our historical moment, Fredric Jameson writes "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination." Why does capitalism seem so inescapable? Why do we see it not just as an economic system that came i...

The HBS hosts try to figure out how much of the ChatGPT panic is warranted. There seems to be a real panic among not only the professoriate, but also employers, about what ChatGPT is doing to "kids these days." The concern in higher education is that ChatGPT makes cheating easier and, by extension, the worry among employers is that all of the college-educated candidates they might interview in the...

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 Alberto Toscano about the long shadow of racial fascism. Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the word "fascism" has moved from the historian’s archives to the editorial pages of newspapers. The point of comparison has generally been drawn from European history, but drawing our analogies and checklists from the trajectory of fascism in Europe obscures both the connec...

The HBS hosts discuss the work of flunkies, goons, duct-tapers, box-tickers, and taskmasters. In the middle of the last century it was expected that the number of working hours-- at least in the so-called "developed" world-- would continue to decrease: just as they had gone from the twelve or ten hours a day down to eight at the beginning of the century,  they would continue to decrease to six or...

The HBS hosts ask Sophie Lewis why the "family" is a troublesome institution. In a society that is increasingly structured around isolated self-interested individuals, the family appears to be the one place of refuge, the heart in a heartless world, a space of care in a world of indifference. What then is the case for abolishing it? How does discussing that reveal the role that the family plays in...

The HBS hosts ask themselves why and how they are under the influence of influencers. Although humans have been influencing other humans for as long as we’ve been around each other, the category of “influencer” is a relatively recent phenomenon, really only emerging in the last decade. In fact, the term “influencer” as we currently understand it—a thoroughly platformized figure who documents, opti...

The HBS hosts rewind the tapes to reconsider episodes 79-81. They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, so we designed “Afterthoughts” to give us a first chance to make a second impression. Whether it’s diving into a particularly thought-provoking comment, exploring new angles, or uncovering a new idea that we missed the first time around, “Afterthoughts” is all about plumb...

The HBS hosts talk about "stuff." Materialism seems to be both one of the oldest and most contended philosophical positions. From Thales saying “all is from water,” to Hobbes saying “whatever is, is a body” to the New Materialism of both feminist philosophers and those influenced by cognitive science, something called “materialism” that has some kind of preference for or gives  priority to matter...

The HBS hosts reconsider what they might've missed in the first three conversations of Season 6. They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, so we designed “Afterthoughts” to give us a first chance to make a second impression. Whether it's diving into a particularly thought-provoking comment, exploring new angles, or uncovering a new idea that we missed the first time around...