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. Forgiveness is not merely an internal journey; it's also a dynamic force that shapes societies and mend...
Sep 08, 2023•57 min•Season 8Ep. 107
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 for a chance to win a tantalizing symbol of freedom and mobility in many rural areas: a brand-new hard...
Sep 01, 2023•1 hr•Season 8Ep. 106
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 have been born at all. This is especially true if one’s life is filled with suffering and then death....
Aug 25, 2023•59 min
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....
Aug 18, 2023•54 min
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, literary analysis, any number of “area studies,” and even economics-- though very few of the scholars wh...
Aug 11, 2023•55 min•Season 7Ep. 105
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 judgment, sagacity, and interpersonal awareness, which are arguably quite different from our capaci...
Aug 04, 2023•52 min•Season 7Ep. 104
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-academic public, tenure may seem like nothing more than a guarantee that haughty academics with cus...
Jul 28, 2023•49 min•Season 7Ep. 103
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 influence in the first decade of the 2000’s. The plots were complex and protracted, not episodic. The pr...
Jul 21, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 7Ep. 102
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 time and energy was better spent on something else, something more useful or productive. Hobbies ar...
Jul 14, 2023•59 min•Season 7Ep. 101
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, we often find that when were out in public and tell people what we do, they will often ask: "what's yo...
Jul 07, 2023•57 min•Season 7Ep. 100
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 connected, relying on each other, close in worldviews and values, while society is impersonal, disconne...
Jun 30, 2023•58 min•Season 7Ep. 99
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 Leviticus, we find Moses warning his people with the admonition, "Do not go up and down as a talebearer among...
Jun 23, 2023•57 min•Season 7Ep. 98
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 women threaten their masculinity), and Men’s Right Activists (who believe that everything from divorce ...
Jun 16, 2023•58 min•Season 7Ep. 97
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 marketplace to their families’ mouths, recognized that not all family members’ need for food had equal wei...
Jun 09, 2023•50 min•Season 7Ep. 96
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 last season with Alberto Toscano. As much as this question of definition is important, a no less importa...
Jun 02, 2023•55 min•Season 7Ep. 95
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 philosophers have argued that humans, in general, have made great “moral progress.” Others argue that hist...
May 26, 2023•58 min•Season 7Ep. 94
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 political model in the ideal of being noncommittal in politics. However, lately even this model has...
May 19, 2023•54 min•Season 7Ep. 93
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 has different opinions on this” or, worst of all, “what’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true...
May 12, 2023•59 min•Season 7Ep. 92
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 particular ideal of subjectivity. Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul is a man who endeavors to be an island, t...
May 05, 2023•57 min•Season 7Ep. 91
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 University, and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He is also on the Morehouse College Boa...
Apr 28, 2023•1 hr 4 min
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 Bar Sessions podcast, make sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotel...
Apr 21, 2023•55 min
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 highlight the subtle, severe, and devastating IRL effects of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which ha...
Apr 15, 2023•1 hr 1 min
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 humanoid robot for home use, we ask: what is the real difference between a robot and a toaster? Do ro...
Apr 07, 2023•1 hr 12 min
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 have never had the opportunity to read it may wonder: what does Plato actually say in the Allegory ...
Mar 31, 2023•56 min•Season 6Ep. 90
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 into existence at a particular time, and will end at some point as well, but as a reflection of some ...
Mar 24, 2023•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 89
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 coming years are really not as "college-educated" as they may appear on paper. Is this panic justif...
Mar 17, 2023•55 min•Season 6Ep. 88
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 have been born at all. This is especially true if one’s life is filled with suffering and then death....
Mar 10, 2023•58 min•Season 6Ep. 87
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 connection between what is happening now in American politics with the history of racism and racial capita...
Mar 03, 2023•54 min•Season 6Ep. 86
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 even less by the end of the century. Furthermore, it was thought that the mechanization and automatio...
Feb 24, 2023•51 min•Season 6Ep. 85
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 capitalism? And what it might take to create a world in which care and nurturing are available to e...
Feb 17, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 84
