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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 toaster?
Do robots and intelligent machines rise to the level of "persons"? Should we accord them moral consideration or legal rights? Or are those questions just the consequence of our over-anthropomorphizing robots and intelligent machines?
Full episode notes available at this link.
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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 training to prepare them for the future they are entering.
Most academics can (and do) make the argument for the intrinsic value of the humanities-- that it helps shape us into good citizens and moral agents-- but are there other defenses available? Does a humanities-based education also have instrumental value? How do you get a job with a History or Philosophy or Anthropology degree? Is humanities-based education for everyone, or is it elitist?
Full episode notes available at this link.
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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 gender, racial, class, ability in terms of identity? We ask about the dates of generations, the characteristics of generations and generational self-consciousness.
Full episode notes at this link.
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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-- before trying to pinpoint the economic and social conditions that make these kinds of hustles so appealing to GenY and GenZ. Then, we turn to the "side-hustle" (gig work), an increasingly necessary hustle in the lives of workers across generations. Finally, we ask: why are we working so hard and in such a hurry all the time?
Full episode notes available at this link.
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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 power to inspire, to sadden, to terrify, and to comfort? How can it be used to manipulate? Is music a key to understanding the order of the Universe? Is it a universal language? And, if music is a common "human" denominator, how do we explain people who have no rhythm, who are "tone-deaf," or why our musical tastes vary so widely?
Full episode notes available at this link.
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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 close towards 1 million, it's easy to forget to the other public health epidemic plaguing the United States, namely, gun violence. Nearly 10,000 people have 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 relaxed so much that they are practically non-existent. A study published earlier this year shows that gun suicides are rising steeply in 2021, including among teenagers and children.
Between January 1-August 31 of 2021, there were 242 days. A mass shooting occurred in the United States on all but 44 of those days.
How did we get here and who have we become? Who is suffering the most from gun violence in the United States, and who is most guilty for gun deaths? Is the Second Amendment's gurantee that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" been interpreted too loosely? Should the Second Amendment be repealed? In this episode, we take a look look at all of those questions, as well as Carol Anderson's new book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.
You can listen to the episode below. Full episode notes at this link.
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, theh "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 the humanities that have a diversity problem. It's the humanities professoriate itself.
First, academics from traditionally dominant demographic groups-- white, make, straight, non-disabled, and middle-to-upper class-- ought not presume that their academic training has necessarily equipped them with the knowledge, skills, or understanding to simply "take up" an unfamiliar field of specialization with the same level of knowledge, skill, and understanding as a specialist in that area possesses. Second, pressuring the current professoriate to "add diversity and stir" tends to de-emphasize the need for universities and individual departments to hire faculty from traditionally under-represented demographics with specialized training in the needed areas. BUT... third, we must also be careful not to assume that every person's scholarly specialization mirrors their personal identity.
How can we think about strategies for diversifying both the curricula and the faculty in humanities fields without reproducing the same prejudices that have made the humanities so non-diverse?
Full episode notes available at this link. You can listen to Episode 24 below:
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 over, connoisseurs of the genre know that the figure of the "superhero' has changed and evolved dramatically over the last half-century. What does the figure of the superhero represent? Who does it serve? How has it adapted to reflect broader culteral, political, and social change?
In this episode, Dr. Charles F. Peterson-- and bona fide connoisseur of comics and superhero films-- schools his novice co-hosts on the nuances of superheroes and their development, as well as the deep and often profound philosophical truths that the figure of the superhero helps to reveal about us ordinary (not super and no heroic) humans.
Full episode notes available at this link. You can listen to Episode 23 below.
For Season 2 of Hotel Bar Sessions, we're recording one "Afterthoughts" episode for every three podcast episodes, which we post to our HBS YouTube channel. The "Afterthoughts" series gives us a chance to say what we wish we would've said during one of the podcasts, or to add something new to the conversation that only occurred to us after the podcast aired.
"Afterthoughts" also gives HBS listeners a chance to see the real, live, made-for-radio faces of the HBS hosts in action!
Here's the first "Afterthoughts" of Season 2, in which we talk about Episode 16 ("Private Cities"), Episode 17 ("Citizenship"), and Episode 18 ("Digital Afterlives"). Enjoy!
In advance of Rick Lee's forthcoming book, 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? Why are philosophers not only hostile to comedy, but also categorically unfunny? Is comedy formulaic or does it resist systematic analysis? What is the difference between laughing at and laughing with? What is happening to us when we laugh together-- as the HBS hosts do a lot in this episode!-- and how does laughter connect us to one another?
John Chrysostom once warned that "laughter often gives birth to foul discourse" and the HBS hosts are determined to prove the archbishop of Constantinople right in this episode. Definitely pour yourself a drink before sitting down to listen to this conversation, because it's a helluva lot of fun!
Full episode notes available on the Hotel Bar Sessions website at this link. Listen to the episode below:
Whether or not you believe in a Heaven or Hell, all of us need to think more seriously about our digital afterlives. Charles, Rick, and Leigh work through some of that thinking-- and much more-- at the hotel bar in this episode.
Check out the full episode notes at this link. Listen to the episode below:
This episode explores the political and ethical dimensions of the category of the "citizen." In anticipation of his soon-to-be-released book Beyond Civil Disobedience: Social Nullification and Black Citizenship (August 2021!), Charles Peterson takes the "captain's seat" for this episode's discussion of the limits of citizenship, the failure of the state, and the construction of new categories of social, political, and civic identity. Millions of people have taken to the streets in protest over the last decade. What are the questions those citizens are asking about the failures of their government? What do these protests say about how we think about the relationship between individuals and their communities, and the relationship of those communities to the State? How can we develop a more robust conception of engaged, healthy, responsible, and critical citizenship?
Check out the full episode notes on the Hotel Bar Sessions website here. Listen to the episode below:
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 Chigoe 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 and, if so, where is it? What can we learn from the fact that even park benches and bus stops are physically-engineered to prevent the unhoused from being able to find rest or shelter? How might we build a more just city?
Check out the full episode notes on the Hotel Bar Sessions website here. Listen to the episode below:
I can't be sure who's still regularly checking in on this blog, but those of you who are have surely noticed that I've shifted my energies from blogging to podcasting over the last year. Beginning in November 2020, I did a 22-episode run of my first podcast BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, in which I interviewed philosophers, filmmakers, and tech-savvy intellectuals about the technology, philosophy, morality, and politics of the Netflix series Black Mirror. Each episode of BMR was dedicated to parsing through one episode of Black Mirror, and I think we ended up with a lot of smart and interesting conversations when the series finally concluded. (It only concluded because we ran out of Black Mirror episodes to talk about!) I more or less "hosted" the Black Mirror Reflections podcast on this blog, so you can find all of the episodes in this blog's feed, or by clicking the "Black Mirror Reflections" tab in the top menu, or at this link.
BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS was a real lifesaver last year. It provided me an opportunity to reach out to other philosophers and to have engaging, smart, and provocative conversations about things that I was interested in at a time when I felt thoroughly trapped and completely isolated in my pandemic bubble. Even though I did all of the BMR interviews and recorded all of the episodes via Zoom, there was a world of difference between sitting in an hour-long Zoom session with one of my BMR guests and the 30 other hours a week I was Zooming for classes, committee meetings, and whatever those lame "virtual happy hours" were supposed to be. In the end, I was really happy with the BMR podcast in terms of its final content but, on reflection, I realized it was a very amateur podcast in terms of audio production and distribution. After it concluded, though, I had definitely caught the podcasting bug, so I committed myself to creating another podcast... but not without learning the (technical) ropes first!
[Insert a couple of months of audio engineering autodidactism, way too much money spent on hardware and software, and many long hours of annoying my partner with conversations about potential podcast ideas!]
Here's what I knew for sure in terms of what I wanted to do next: I definitely wanted to do a "philosophy" podcast, but I didn't want it to be too inside-baseball. That is to say, I wanted to cover topics that were philosophically interesting, but maybe not so obviously capital-P Philosophy in the way that academics might reckon it. I didn't want listeners to feel like they were required to have a deep familiarity with academic Philosophy to "get" what was going on in the conversation, and I definitely didn't want to require listeners to do homework in advance just to understand why what we were talking about was important or interesting.
I also didn't want to do a podcast where I just blathered on in front of a mic, alone. So I knew I was going to need co-hosts, but I also knew I needed co-hosts that could talk about philosophically interesting topics in a not-too-inside-baseball way, and who were open-minded enough to have an expansive and non-prejudicial sense of what was "philosophically interesting."
Was this even possible?
For Episode 22 (our last episode!), I am joined by Dr. James Buchanan "Bru" Wallace to talk about religion, techniques of the self, guilt, the imperative to look up from your screen and really see others, and "Smithereens" (Season 5, Episode 2 of Black Mirror), which first premiered in 2019.
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