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, optimizes, and monetizes their self as “brand”—wasn’t officially included in English dictionaries until ...
Feb 10, 2023•48 min•Season 6Ep. 83
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 plumbing the depths of our previous conversations. We look back over our last three Season 6 episodes—epi...
Feb 09, 2023•33 min
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 seems to always tempt philosophers. Yet, philosophy is a way of thinking about things, and thought ha...
Feb 03, 2023•48 min•Season 6Ep. 82
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, "Afterthoughts" is all about plumbing the depths of our previous conversations. We look back over ...
Feb 01, 2023•48 min•Season 6Ep. 1
The HBS hosts invite Michael Naas to make himself at home on the podcast. There are two popular ideas about hospitality that seem to be at odds with one another. The first is an understanding of a bygone era in which our ancestors were frequently forced–- through battles, famines, the search for water, etc.–- to move frequently and, for many of them, regularly. Under such conditions, the virtue of welcoming a guest was prized among many other virtues. “Tomorrow I might need this hospitality,” le...
Jan 27, 2023•57 min•Season 6Ep. 81
The HBS hosts focus their attention on... oh, look, a squirrel! It is said that we are living in an attention economy, an age in which attention has become both a scarce resource and a source of wealth. Devices and apps do everything in their power to solicit our attention and keep us glued to our screens, turning minutes scrolling and clicks into revenue. Because of this demand on our attention, distraction has become an ongoing problem; from the road to the classroom we are worried that we are...
Jan 20, 2023•56 min•Season 6Ep. 80
The HBS hosts argue for the merits of studying the history of philosophy. In a recent essay , Hanno Sauer argued against the importance, for philosophy, of the history of philosophy. In summary, he presented a positivistic, scientistic model of philosophy, namely, that like physics, biology, and chemistry, philosophy has actually “made progress” on many of the issues that philosophy struggled with from Thales until relatively recently. Because of this progress, Sauer's argument goes, we do not n...
Jan 13, 2023•57 min•Season 6Ep. 79
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 out that all of this is because of a shift in the theoretical and mathematical approach to probability....
Jan 06, 2023•54 min•Season 6Ep. 78
The HBS hosts ask not what is human nature, but what is at stake in this constant recourse to human nature. The history of philosophy can in part be understood as one long rumination on the question of human nature. Throughout its history philosophers have put forward multiple definitions of what it means to be human and what sets humans apart from other animals: political animal, rational animal, tool making animal, etc., but these definitions have come under scrutiny for both the way they main...
Dec 30, 2022•57 min•Season 6Ep. 77
The HBS hosts return to the movies and this week we are discussing Casablanca . Shot in 1942, a year after the U.S. entered The Second “World War,” Casablanca makes it onto many lists of the best movies of all time. It is part caper movie, part romance, part war flick, and part resistance movie. These are woven together in a fairly complex plot that is beautifully shot, has gorgeous characters, and has given us some memorable lines. On top of all of that, the entire movie takes place almost excl...
Dec 23, 2022•53 min•Season 6Ep. 76
While the HBS hosts are taking a break between Season 5 and Season 6, we're re-playing some of our favorite conversations you might have missed. Enjoy this episode from Season 3 "Whose History?" (with special guest, Dr. Charles McKinney ) and check out the full episode notes at this link : http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-31-whose-history/ If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, make sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast . You can also he...
Oct 28, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 3Ep. 31
While the HBS hosts are taking a break between Season 5 and Season 6, we're re-playing some of our favorite conversations you might have missed. Enjoy this episode from Season 4 on "Style" and check out the full episode notes at this link : http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-47-style/ If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast . You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financial...
Oct 25, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 4Ep. 47
The HBS hosts-- now, all four of them!-- chat about what podcasting can do for Philosophy. There are roughly 2.4 million podcasts in existence right now, with over 66 million episodes between them, and recent studies show that 28% of Americans listen to podcasts weekly. Podcast genres are as diverse as human interests themselves; there are comedy podcasts, social and cultural podcasts, health and fitness podcasts, political podcasts, true crime podcasts (some of which have truly helped to solve ...
Oct 14, 2022•55 min•Season 5Ep. 75
The HBS hosts reflect on four fantastic seasons with the inimitable Charles Peterson. Co-host Charles F. Peterson has been the beating heart of Hotel Bar Sessions for the last four seasons. Throughout that time, he has pushed the podcast to be more and more expansive, in deeper and deeper ways, with his intellect, curiosity, and rapier-like wit. Charles was the mastermind behind many of our best episodes, the connection to some of our best guests, and the source of our most hilarious on-air mome...
Oct 07, 2022•53 min•Season 5Ep. 74
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 discursive webs a little bit with Dr. Rini, not so much to settle the question “Is AI sentience possible?” b...
Sep 30, 2022•58 min•Season 5Ep. 73
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 and moral "personhood"-- of natural entities? What sorts of protections might be extended by the law ...
Sep 23, 2022•1 hr•Season 5Ep. 72
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.O. Scott is chief film critic (along with Manohla Dargis) for The New York Times. He also write for...
Sep 16, 2022•55 min•Season 5Ep. 71
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 asking for many years prior to Jan 6, 2021. And it is a question we should still be asking. At the feder...
Sep 09, 2022•57 min•Season 5Ep. 70
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 fear from dread or anxiety? How are fears managed or overcome? Why do so many people share similar p...
Sep 02, 2022•56 min•Season 5Ep. 69
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 internet slang) is called “red-pilling”—that is, the conversion of users to far-right beliefs. Today, we’r...
Aug 26, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 68
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 ableist presuppositions of philosophy but also to alter philosophy for the better by the inclusion of the ...
Aug 19, 2022•53 min•Season 5Ep. 67
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 Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London and the author of ...
Aug 12, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 5Ep. 66
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 blues? Should everyone? In this episode, the HBS co-hosts discuss these questions (and more!) with ...
Aug 05, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 65
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 "natural" processes in their generation, mutation, adaptation, and replication. With our special guest, And...
Jul 29, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 64
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 make of the fact that, since the 17th C., inheritors of “European Enlightenment” thinkers unilaterally ...
Jul 22, 2022•55 min•Season 5Ep. 63
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 and plagiarism is on the rise; many blame remote learning for what feels like a "plagiarism pandemic...
Jul 15, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 5Ep. 62
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 in the media, as a columnist for TIME Magazine and as an MSNBC contributor on programs like Morning J...
Jul 08, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 61
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 matters. We consider the whole menagerie of falsehoods: from trifling fibs ("you look great in those pants...
Jun 17, 2022•57 min•Season 4Ep. 60
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 episode, we talk with Dr. Ladelle McWhorter (University of Richmond) about that complicated history, inclu...
Jun 10, 2022•57 min•Season 4Ep. 59
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 importance, problems, and possibilities of utopia. Full episode notes at this link: http://hotel...
Jun 03, 2022•58 min•Season 4Ep. 58
