Hotel Bar Sessions

The HBS hosts consider the possibility of sentient artificial intelligence with Dr. Regina Rini. The debate about the possibility of emergent AI sentience has staunch defenders both for an against, many more people shrugging their shoulders in the middle, with many, diverse, and non-interchangeable lexicons being used to discuss this phenomenon. Today, we’re going to try to untangle those discursi...

The HBS hosts discuss legal personhood and rights for rivers, lakes, and mountains with Dr. Stewart Motha. In most discussions about extending rights or legal personhood to non-humans, the focus tends to be on robots/machines or non-human animals. However, given our current global climate crisis, we have good reason to ask: isn't it time to devote more attention to the rights-- and perhaps legal a...

The HBS hosts chat with A.O. Scott about the role and responsibilities of the critic. The critic is frequently seen as a parasite who lives of the creative life of others but not producing a work of art through their criticism. In this episode, we are honored to be joined by A.O. Scott to discuss the role of the critic, the creativity of criticism, and the mutual dependence of art and criticism. A...

The HBS hosts ask Dr. Linda Alcoff just how close to the edge of the bed is the United States sleeping? A year and a half ago, as an angry, armed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building in what was, thankfully, an unsuccessful insurrection attempt, many of us watching the event unfold on television asked ourselves: is democracy itself in peril? This is, of course, a question we should have been aski...

The HBS hosts wonder whether the call is coming from inside the house. Fear is a one of the most complex of human affects. It is both physical and psychological. It can be intensely private or shared by entire communities. It is sometimes paralyzing and other times exciting. Fear often seizes us without warning, but we can also "think ourselves into" being afraid.  What, if anything, distinguishes...

The HBS hosts chat with Caleb Cain about his experience being radicalized by the Alt-Right internet. In June 2019, the New York Times featured a story about Caleb Cain, entitled " The Making of a YouTube Radical .” That piece was meant to highlight the subtle, severe, and devastating IRL effects of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which has been proven many times over to promote what (in intern...

The HBS hosts talk with Dr. Joel Michael Reynolds about what bodies are afforded and denied.   As we come to recognize more and more the occlusions that occur in, and often constitute, philosophy and its history, attention to an ableist presupposition in philosophy has come to the fore. Much as with feminist theory or queer theory or race theory, disability theory not only works to expose the able...

The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Kate Devlin to talk about social relationships between humans and machines. When most people think about our future with robots, they tend to ask the following three questions: (1) Will robots take my job?. (2) Will they kill us?, and (3) Can I have sex with them? This week, the HBS hosts are joined by Dr. Kate Devlin , Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artific...

 The HBS hosts ask Dr. Charles Hughes for water, and he gives them gasoline.   According to co-host Charles Peterson, the blues is "as American as apple pie and as Black as the Funky Chicken." The blues is a genre of music, to be sure, but it's also an emotion, perhaps even an existential bearing. What makes blues music distinctive? What does it mean to have "the blues"? Can everyone have or play...

The HBS hosts try to go viral with Andrew Baron, creator of KnowYourMeme.  Memes: if you get them, you get them... and if you don't, you don't. But how is a meme created? How does it spread? And how does it die? In this episode, we dig into the complex dynamics of memes-- on Dawkins' account, the most rudimentary units of social information-- to see how they do (and don't) imitate so-called "natur...

The HBS hosts investigate the limits of Reason alone and, more importantly, in real human history. Many, rightly, understand the discipline of Philosophy as primarily defined by its commitment to Reason. But, what is “Reason”? Is it universal? Is it some kind of fundamental human capacity that transcends class, culture, politics, religion, or any other iteration of human difference? What do we mak...

The HBS hosts attempt to measure the real stakes of cheating. According to a recent study , almost 60% of college/university students in the United States admit to having cheated at least once during their studies. Around 15% of U.S. students admit to plagiarizing intentionally and, of those, less than 1 in 5 is caught or punished for academic dishonesty. Professors regularly report that cheating...

The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr. to talk about what constitutes a "public intellectual." Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr . is the James S. McDonnel Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University, and one of America's leading public intellectuals. He is also on the Morehouse College Board of Trustees . He frequently appears i...

The HBS hosts try to get to the truth of untruths. Mark Twain famously claimed that there are three kinds of untruth: lies, damned lies, and statistics.  In an age of widespread misinformation, where it has become considerably more difficult to distinguish between truths and lies, the HBS hosts make an impassioned plea for us to think seriously about what a lie is, what it is not, and why it matte...

The HBS hosts chat with Dr. Ladelle McWhorter about the evolution of "queer" as an identity category and a verb. Once only used as a slur with unambiguously negative valences, the noun "queer" has been reappropriated by (many) members of the LGBTQIA+ community as referring to a positive, even celebrated, notion of self-identity.... but the history of the term "queer" is complicated. In this episod...

The HBS hosts discuss the where, when, and how of utopic imagination. On the one hand, utopia as an ideal place, space, political arrangement, or future has been criticized because it delays action to some, perhaps impossible, future. On the other hand, something like utopia just might be necessary for political struggles. We begin with Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz and move on to discuss...

The HBS hosts sit down with Justin Weinberg of the Daily Nous to talk about philosophers on the internet. While everyone is on the internet, many philosophers (some of whom may be on this podcast!) seem resistant to blogging, social media, and other forms of web presence. In this episode, we look at philosophers on the internet. What benefits does the internet bring to philosophy and/or philosophe...

The HBS hosts chat with actor, dancer, and choreographer Blake Zolfo about what makes musical theater so unique. What could possibly make musical theater important or relevant to three philosophers? We all love musicals! The affective appeal of musical theater is clear, even though there are those (philistines?) who do not find it enjoyable. Although Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Fin...

 The HBS hosts wrestle with Fukuyama's "Why National Identity Is Matters."  In this episode, we will focus on questions of national identity. In the U.S., the contemporary political moment is riven with competing ideas of what the United States is or are. These ideas are based in various ways of knowing including ideological, political, racial, and generational. Using Francis Fukuyama’s essay “Why...

The HBS hosts discuss the pervasiveness and perversity of algorithms in our lives. Algorithms measure, and increasingly influence/determine, our behaviors. Yet, most people don’t know or understand what an algorithm is! Algorithms are essential to the logic of late capitalism and people need to understand them in order to work toward more ethical AI. Full episode notes at this link: http://hotelba...

The HBS hosts get to the bottom of what is real, what exists, and what is virtual. In this episode, we take head on the question of whether an analysis, understanding, and assumption of reality, in other words, metaphysics, is a crucial task for philosophy. We argue about whether metaphysics should come before social and political theory, political engagement, and ethics. We come clean about our o...

The HBS hosts talk about the striving to live forever in physical, psychical, and social dimensions. Immortality seems to be a spoken and unspoken obsession within contemporary culture, whether through the obsession with maintaining youthful looks through diet, exercise or, medical procedure or the hope for a future where people can live on as memories or even as digital intelligences. We talk abo...

The HBS hosts unpack Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals , Section 13, to uncover how we arrived at morality and moral subjectivity.  There are conditions that seem to be necessary in order for our whole moral outlook and values, conditions that are not found in nature. What must be the case in order for one to be said to be morally responsible? In this episode, we take Section 13 of Nietzsche's Genea...

The HBS hosts look under the hood, inspect the engine, and try to figure out what drives us.  Perhaps more than any other affect, desire is put to work in so many areas of philosophy. For Plato, it is the beginning of knowledge (or the soul’s search for truth), for Augustine, it is what marks post-lapsarian humanity–“Our hears are restless until they rest in you.” For Hobbes, it is one of the root...

The HBS hosts discuss the role of memory in the constitution of human intelligence, subjectivity and culture/civilization. As we age, we often lose the ability to retain our past experiences. In doing so, we seem to lose a part (or even all) of our selves. What is the role of memory in the constitution of human intelligence, subjectivity and culture/civilization? In this episode, the HBS hosts dis...