Hotel Bar Sessions

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. Kant, not able to provide a reason why living is so great, simply says that it is the parents’ job to reconcile their children to existence! On the other hand, we have the 20th century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, arguing that we will only be authentically what we are when we take on our own death as the possibility that is the condition of our existence.  Co-host Rick Lee is fairly confident that death is "stupid." As he notes, when a loved one dies, our thoughts do not go to authenticity but to the fact that it sucks and is painful that there is now a hole, a gap, in my world that cannot possibly be made good again. It’s no wonder that people turn to the hope or wish that all will be made right again in the end. So, he asks: “what is death?” and what is the “meaning" of death?Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-87-death-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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. Bayesian statistics, the primary model used by machine learning systems, currently dominates almost everything about our lives: investing, sales at stores, political predictions, and, increasingly, what we think we know about the world. How did the "Bayesian revolution" come about? And how did come to dominate? And, perhaps more importantly, is this the best mathematical/statistical model available to us? Or is there another, more "revolutionary," mathematics out there?This week we are joined by Justin Joque, visualization librarian at University of Michigan who writes at the intersection of philosophy and technology. He is the author Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar and, most recently, Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism.Full episode notes available at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-78-revolutionary-mathematics-with-justin-joque-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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 who reference it have slogged all the way through Hegel’s Phenomenology. Nevertheless, like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from the Republic and Nietzsche’s story about the lambs and the birds of prey from Genealogy of Morals, both of which we’ve discussed before on this podcast, Hegel’s dialectic of Lordship and Bondage manages to capture, in a concise and powerful way, something both intuitively true and yet, at the same time, utterly mystifying. This week we ask the question, why has this passage become the hit single off of the dense concept album that is the Phenomenology.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-105-the-master-slave-dialectic -------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review!Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!    ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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 capacity to apply a rule or logically reason from premise to conclusion.Comics (perhaps the least interested in “propriety” among us)  call this “timing,” and they spend years perfecting optimal joke delivery. When their timing fails, or when they can’t “read the room,” they bomb. Sometimes that’s the consequence of a deficit in their delivery– their  rhythm, cadence, tempo, or pausing– but sometimes the joke itself fails. For example, in the months immediately following 9/11, most comics who joked about the attacks of that day were met with gasps and groans from their audience. "Too soon," the audience would heckle with the bad taste of “bad taste” in their mouths, too soon.Today we’re going to try to unpack what “too soon” means, how we determine how soon is “too soon,” and whether or not there are, in fact, some “rules” of propriety.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-104-too-soon -------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!   ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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 cushy jobs can’t be fired unless, as the old adage goes, “they’re caught with a dead woman or a live boy”? Who doesn’t want job security?As with all things that we discuss on this podcast, though, the question of tenure is much more complicated that it appears at first glance. Once established as a institutional protection of academic freedom, the dynamics, significance, and real-world effects of the granting and/or denial of tenure have dramatically changed as the University, the culture, and the political intervention of state legislative bodies have changed. In this episode, we’re talking about tenure: “get out of jail free card” or the necessary codification of a social good?Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-103-tenure -------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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 protagonists were antiheroes, not heroes, morally ambiguous, hard to endorse, but impossible not to like.  There was foul language and graphic violence and full-frontal nudity. And since nobody could access this content with an antenna and tin-foil, we paid for it. It’s since been dubbed “prestige tv,” in part (I think) to assuage the consciences of all those snooty people who looooooved to say that they “didn’t watch tv.” Prestige tv included shows you couldn’t not watch—not because you wouldn’t be “cool” or you might be left out of the most recent water-cooler small-talk, but because prestige tv was quite literally re-shaping culture itself.The Sopranos. Lost. Mad Men. The Wire. Breaking Bad. House of Cards. True Detective. Game of Thrones. Atlanta.Today we’re going to talk about prestige tv, in my opinion one of the most significant, and uniquely American, artistic movements since rock n’ roll. What makes prestige tv prestigious? How do we know it when we see it? What are some of the best examples of it? And, perhaps most importantly, why are we seeing less of it?Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-102-prestige-tv-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.   ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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 are often seen as antisocial, as something undertaken by a person who does not have friends, or family members, but at the same time they are the basis of many people’s social existence. Is there something to redeem hobbies in an age in which ceaseless productivity is the norm and standard? Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-hobbies-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.   ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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 your philosophy?. So, this week, we're asking each other that same question.What does it mean to have a philosophy of one’s own? Do each of the hosts have “a philosophy”? Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-100-whats-your-philosophy-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.   ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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, disconnected, with members that are independent and may not share values. (Think about small town vs. big city!) A debate subsequently arose in Germany about whether one was better than the other and Tönnies seems to have expressed more positive views about community than about society. More recently, though, “community” has taken on a somewhat different resonance. We speak of the "queer" community/communities, the "Latin American" community, et al, and it seems we are referring to a group that has affinities in terms their members' interests and values, but may not be constituted by personal connections and direct relations. For Tönnies, community appears to name a group gathered under the principle “we don’t do that here,” and therefore can be oppressive or repressive. Yet, today, community often indicates an association that is affirming and enabling.... even if that latter community can also, at times, turn repressive as a community calls one of its members a turncoat, or worse.Today, we ask: is "community" the appropriate ground of politics? Or is it, rather, a menace to "society"?Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-99-community-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.   ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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 your people." Both remind us of gossip’s ability to captivate our attention, and the real harms it can inflict.Yet, it’s not so easy to just dismiss gossip as mere frivolous chatter. Some evolutionary biologists link the emergence of language itself to gossip, and sociologists have long argued that the ability to engage in gossip played a vital role in our species' development, enabling us to form complex social networks, navigate alliances, and share information about others.Gossip is not without its dual nature. It serves as a source of transmission for both amity and enmity. It can strengthen social bonds, create a sense of belonging, and forge alliances… but it also has the power to breed division, stoke resentment, and destroy reputations. Is gossip a necessary, even essential, operation of human sociality? Is gossiping morally blameworthy in every instance, or are there instances in which gossiping is justified? What distinguishes “gossiping” from “reporting,” or “divulging,” or even just “communicating”? Full episode notes at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-98-gossip-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.   ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★