The HBS hosts discuss the nature, origin, and deployment of superstitions. It seems as if superstitions just evidence a misunderstanding of the relation between some cause and some effect. So, training in critical thinking *should* help to allay superstitions… and, yet, it doesn’t. How important are behaviors to superstitions? Do superstitions require a belief in the supernatural? Are there harmless superstitions? Full episode notes at this link : http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-43-su...
Jan 28, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 3Ep. 43
The HBS hosts talk about optimism and pessimism in its personal, political, and philosophical senses. We tend to think of optimism and pessimism as personal, psychological characteristics. Betty White said that her secret to living to just so shy of 100 was that she never ate anything green and that she was a “cockeyed optimist.” But it seems as if there are non-personal, non-philosophical senses of optimism/ pessimism. There is clearly a political sense–can we work together to amass power to ma...
Jan 21, 2022•56 min•Season 3Ep. 42
The HBS hosts discuss the ugly underside of tourism. Tourism is a superficial activity that has deep historical and political underpinnings. In A Small Place , Jamaica Kincaid argues highlights the power relation within tourism, where the tourist lives a life that allows them to visit the land of the (Fanonian) native. Tourism suggests privilege and power and a shaping of the world that makes a person a tourist. What other types of tourism are there? What are the other implications of being a to...
Jan 14, 2022•58 min•Season 3Ep. 41
The HBS hosts talk about resolutions and the resolve behind them. It is close to the start of a new year and at this time resolutions are in the air. But what is it to make a resolution? And if you make a resolution, do you have to also have the resolve to carry it through? And what is resolve? In this episode, let’s talk about resolutions and resolve. Full episode notes at this link : WEBSITE: www.hotelbarpodcast.com SUPPORT US HERE: patreon.com/hotelbarsessions ★ Support this podcast on Patreo...
Jan 07, 2022•55 min•Season 3Ep. 40
The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Jason Read to talk about how to understand work in the 21st C. In this episode, Jason Read (Philosophy, University of Southern Maine) joins us to examine the Boots Riley ‘s film Sorry To Bother You (2018) and what it might be able to tell us about the dystopic situation of the 21st C. worker. Why has it become so important that the worker demonstrate that they “love” their work? How much of our work demands “emotional labor”? Why is it necessary for (some) workers...
Dec 31, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 3Ep. 39
The HBS hosts talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media. Social media dominate much of our current lives. Sometimes this is for the better, sometimes this is for the worse. Social media platforms allow much that is beneficial to individuals, communities, and society. Yet they also allow much that is detrimental or even damaging. What is good about social media? What is bad? And what is downright ugly? We talk about who is helped by social media and who is hurt by it. We talk abo...
Dec 24, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 38
The HBS hosts talk about transcendence, the good kind and the bad kind. Philosophers traditionally have thought of entities like God or Ideas as outside of or other than this world. At the same time, that transcendent reality is thought to be the cause or meaning of our reality. Is this the only kind of transcendence? Do we need transcendence? Perhaps politics and/or justice requires some notion of transcendence. Can we have a good transcendence without the bad? Full episode notes available at t...
Dec 17, 2021•58 min•Season 3Ep. 37
The HBS hosts discuss philosophy and theory in relation to the global south with Prof. Surti Singh . We does it mean to theorize from the Global South? What tools can theory bring to the global south? And is there such a thing as The Global South? We talk with Prof. Surti Singh, the co-principal investigator of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s project “Extimacies: Critical Theory from the Global South” about these issues and what theorists in the global south challenge the “north” to encounter ...
Dec 10, 2021•49 min•Season 3Ep. 36
The HBS host discuss the criminal justice system’s failure to produce morally right outcomes. The "not guilty" verdicts in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial made plain the often dramatic difference between what is legally permissible and what is morally permissible. In this episode, we talk about where that difference should be maintained and where it should be diminished or abolished. Full episode notes at this link . ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★...
Dec 03, 2021•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 35
The HBS hosts discuss so-called “cancel culture” and the panic surrounding it. For some, “canceling” is an essential tool of social justice. For others, it is a threat to free speech. In this episode, we try to identify what cancelation involves (de-platforming, boycotting, public criticism, shaming), what it doesn’t involve ( actual silencing), and just how common it is (not common enough to constitute a “culture,” we think). Is cancel culture itself evidence of a moral panic, or is there a can...
Nov 26, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 3Ep. 34
The HBS hosts discuss the pedagogical pros and cons of thoughts experiments. Philosophy has its own laboratory! While it doesn’t have graduated cylinders or Bunsen burners, it is a “clean room” in which philosophers can distill the essential elements of a theory. We talk about the pros and cons of thought experiments, their uses, and their abuses. We give some examples of famous thought experiments and, yes, we talk about the trolley problem. Full episode notes at this link . ★ Support this podc...
Nov 19, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 3Ep. 33
The HBS hosts wonder whether there is a uniquely "American" form of Christianity. There are more than 2.3 billion Christians in the world, and 205 million of them live in the United States of America. Is there an identifiable strain of Christianity that is unique to the U.S.? If so, what are its dominant characteristics? How closely does it adhere to-- or how far does it stray from-- the basic tenets of Christianity? In this episode, the HBS hosts take a hard look at some of the more curious fea...
Nov 12, 2021•59 min•Season 3Ep. 32
The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Charles McKinney, Jr. to talk about whose history is (and isn't) being taught. Following on the heels of a recent and very contentious political debate over the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools , we invited Dr. Charles McKinney, Jr. (Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of History at Rhodes College ) to sit for a few rounds at the hotel bar as we explore the dynamics of power, liberation, and Truth as they play out in...
Nov 05, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 3Ep. 31
The HBS hosts discuss how robots and intelligent machines are upending our social, moral, legal, and philosophical categories. For this last episode of Season 2, 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 humanoid robot for home use, we ask: what is the real difference between a robot and a...
Oct 08, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Season 2Ep. 30
The HBS hosts present their best defense of humanities-based education and, in doing so, try to justify their existences. As higher education has become more corporatized and STEM-focused, areas of study are often "pitched" to students on the basis of their future income-earning potential. However, college students now are entering a workforce where more than 30% of available jobs will be automated before those students reach middle age. Today's college students need more than vocational trainin...
Oct 01, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Season 2Ep. 29
The HBS hosts discuss whether or not generational tags– “Boomer,” “GenX,” “Millennial,” and “Gen Z”– are useful descriptions or just gerrymandered groups. Are you Gen Z, a Boomer, Gen X? We don’t know either but in this episode Dr. Rick Lee leads a discussion to try to figure out whether these generational designations have any stable meaning. Do they make sense as organizational categories. Are they Objective Types, Natural Kind, or Gerrymandered Sets? Do generational markers say more than gend...
Sep 24, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 2Ep. 28
The HBS hosts discuss scams, cons, gig work, and what drives us to live and work at full speed. In the immortal words of Clifford Joseph Harris, Jr. (aka, T.I.) "If you don't respect nothing else, you will respect the hustle." In this episode, Dr. Leigh M. Johnson takes the lead in an analysis of how "the hustle," in all senses of that term, define our lives today. We look at the HBO docuseries Generation Hustle -- which tracks the stories of 10 young scammers, con-artists, and/or sociopaths-- b...
Sep 17, 2021•55 min•Season 2Ep. 27
The HBS hosts talk about music, mathematics, groove, and "altar calls." Dr. Charles Peterson takes the lead in this week's discussion of the power of music in our lives. After a quick run-down of each co-host's own musical likes and dislikes, the HBS gang jumps right into a consideration of the effect that music has on us both as individuals and collectively. Does music give us some singular insight into what it means to be human? What does music evoke within us? How does it seem to have the pow...
Sep 10, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 26
The HBS hosts try to figure out why there are 150 guns for every 100 Americans. In the midst of a pandemic, as COVID-related deaths creep closer towards 1 million, it's easy to forget the other public health epidemic plaguing the United States, namely, gun violence. Nearly 10,000 people had already been killed by gun violence by June of 2021, with no sign of slowing numbers. Schoolchildren regularly practice "active shooter" drills and, in states like Tennessee, gun-control laws have been relaxe...
Sep 03, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 2Ep. 25
The HBS hosts discuss academic specializations and how to make the humanities more inclusive. Over the last several decades, there has been a long-overdue push for professors in the humanities to diversify their curricula to include more women, BIPOC, queer, disabled, and other under-represented thinkers and texts. Yet, the “add diversity and stir” model for syllabus design in many ways fails to address a lot of the problems that motivated this demand in the first place. It isn’t just syllabi in...
Aug 27, 2021•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 24
The HBS hosts discuss the role of superheroes in culture and popular media. In American graphic fiction and contemporary film, the superhero stands at the center of many popular narratives. Superhero stories published by DC Comics and Marvel are a multi-million dollar per year industry and, in 2019 alone, superhero movies grossed 3.19 billion dollars in revenue. Although it may seem to the novice as if these publishing houses and film studios just recycle the same stories (and sequels) over and ...
Aug 20, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 2Ep. 23
The HBS hosts take a critical look at the white working class and their grievances. Leading up to the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, and even more so afterwards, the U.S. found itself inundated with analyses of the allegedly “overlooked” grievances of the white working class. Were those legitimate grievances that should have been affirmed and addressed? Who belongs to the WWC in America, anyway? Do they share a “class consciousness” in the traditional Marxian sense, or are they primari...
Aug 13, 2021•58 min•Season 2Ep. 22
The HBS hosts discuss conspiracy theories and what motivates people to believe in them. The word "conspiracy" derives from the Latin con- ("with" or "together") and spirare ("to breathe"), and it seems like more and more people are breathing in the thin air of dubious explanations and bonding together over them. From Q-Anon to flat earthers to anti-vaxxers to climate change deniers to people convinced that a pedophilic, blood-drinking, sex-trafficking, deep state cabal is orchestrating our lives...
Aug 06, 2021•59 min•Season 2Ep. 21
The HBS hosts lower themselves into the muck in this NSFW episode. Dr. Charles F. Peterson is in the hot seat for this episode’s discussion of vulgarity. What is the difference between obscenity, profanity, and vulgarity? Who determines what is “appropriate”? Is the very concept of vulgarity elitist? Full episode notes available at this link . ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★...
Jul 30, 2021•55 min•Season 2Ep. 20
In advance of Rick Lee’s forthcoming book on laughter, co-hosts Charles and Leigh ask him why he thinks all “theories” of comedy are inadequate. What exactly is the “joke” part of a joke? Is comedy fundamentally formulaic or does it escape systematic analysis? What is happening when we laugh together– as the HBS co-hosts do a lot in this episode!– and how does laughter connect us to other people? John Chrysostom once warned that “laughter often gives birth to foul discourse” and the HBS hosts ar...
Jul 23, 2021•58 min•Season 2Ep. 19
Co-host Leigh M. Johnson is in the hot seat for this episode's discussion of digital afterlives. If we consider the "digital," information-based self to be distinguishable from the meatspace self, we should ask: how long can the Digital Me live on after my meatspace body dies? Technology already enables us to "re-animate" archives of personal information in many ways, and some futurists believe that we may, someday, be able to upload our consciousnesses to the cloud . Who owns that information? ...
Jul 16, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 18
This episode explores the political and ethical dimensions of the category of “citizen”. In anticipation of his soon-to-be-released book Beyond Civil Disobedience: Social Nullification and Black Citizenship (August, 2021), Charles sits down in the captain's "hot" seat for this episode's discussion of the limits of citizenship, the failure of the state, and the construction of new categories of political, social and civic identity. Millions of people have taken to the streets in protest over the ...
Jul 09, 2021•58 min•Season 2Ep. 17
The HBS hosts discuss how cities, once considered hubs of public life and interaction, have become increasingly segregated, partitioned, disconnected, and privatized. Drawing on his experience using the city of a Chicago as a classroom, Rick Lee asks: can we identify the material markers of "privatization" in contemporary cities? How do we know which parts of the city are for "us," which parts of the city are for everyone, and which parts aren't? Is there anything like a "public commons" anymore...
Jul 02, 2021•56 min•Season 2Ep. 16
Full episode notes at this link . ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
Jun 04, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Full episode notes at this link . ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
May 28, 2021•56 min•Season 1Ep. 14
