Hotel Bar Sessions

Family "No Contact" (with Kiran Bhardwaj)

There have been many reports in the last several years of a growing trend of estranged families in the United States. For those who make the decision to go "no contact" (or "low contact") with their family members, the response from non-family members can be a mixed bag of support and judgment... often independent of the person's reasons for making that choice. What’s going on with the contemporary phenomenon of people going low or no contact with their family members? Is such a decision morally acceptable, or is forgiveness and relationship maintenance something we owe to others, but especially our family? What does a "good" family look like? And why do we so often find ourselves in the position of hoping for the best without any guarantees that things will turn out well?In this episode, we investigate the ways in which our families shape our identities and how the stories we tell about family relationships often determine how we see and understand others. As you’ll notice throughout the episode, it turns out that nothing gets people going like family! We're joined by Dr. Kiran Bhardwaj, whose work centers on these complex ethical issues and who walks us through some philosophical distinctions that may help in navigating the murky waters of distressed family relations. Grab a drink and join us as we attempt to think through, rather than simply react to, the long and tangled ties of family.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/family---------------------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Food (with Bob Valgenti)

This week, our co-hosts are joined at the bar by Dr. Robert T. Valgenti, philosopher and professor at the Culinary Institute of America to talk about food, the “gastronomic event,” the ethics and politics of cooking and eating, and what it means to be human.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/food---------------------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Anonymity

Anonymity is usually sold as a kind of freedom: the ability to speak without fear, to move through public space without being tracked, to test ideas and identities without immediate consequences. In this episode of Hotel Bar Sessions, the co-hosts pull up stools to ask whether anonymity actually liberates—or whether it more often dissolves responsibility. Starting with Plato’s Ring of Gyges (and the old moral stress test, what would you do if no one could see you?), the conversation traces a familiar worry: that anonymity invites cruelty, petty opportunism, and moral self-deception, while publicity and accountability form part of the “social glue” that keeps a democratic community from fraying. But the episode refuses the easy conclusion that anonymity is always corrupting. The hosts distinguish anonymity as a shield for the powerless—whistleblowers, survivors, precarious workers, and people exploring vulnerable dimensions of identity—from anonymity as impunity for the powerful. And then the stakes sharpen: when state agents mask themselves, anonymity stops being a personal protection and becomes a political weapon—an engineered unaccountability that makes contestation nearly impossible and turns “rule of law” into theater. The discussion returns again and again to the unequal distribution of exposure: who is forced to be legible, who gets to disappear, and how institutions (and now AI systems) can hide decision-making behind corporate names, bureaucratic opacity, and algorithmic excuses. The episode closes by arguing for nuance without moral mush. One can oppose masked, unidentifiable state power while still defending privacy and the selective necessity of anonymity for those at risk.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/anonymity---------------------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Catastrophic Philosophy

Catastrophe usually sounds like a synonym for disaster—but in this episode, it’s treated as a philosophical concept: a “downturn” that scrambles a world’s legibility and forces a basic question—what can still be believed now? Starting from Greek tragedy (where catastrophe names a plot’s turning point), the conversation traces how ruptures—ancient, modern, natural, political—expose finitude and test the limits (and complicities) of inherited frameworks of reason.From there, the episode pivots into a philosophy of catastrophe: the work of making horrors intelligible by clarifying the structures that made them possible, while also asking what catastrophe demands ethically—what must never happen again, and what that imperative requires of living, thinking, and teaching after rupture.Finally, the episode debates philosophy as catastrophe: whether certain ideas don’t merely respond to downturns but actively produce them by breaking prior worlds of sense—recasting what counts as knowledge, power, nature, and the human. The conversation closes with an unsettling contemporary candidate: LLM-generated “philosophy papers” as a potential wheel-smashing shift in how philosophy is produced, circulated, and evaluated.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/catastrophic-philosophy---------------------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Intelligence(s)

What do we mean when we talk about intelligence—and who, or what, gets counted as intelligent in the first place? In this episode of Hotel Bar Sessions, our co-hosts pull up stools at the bar to tackle the idea of intelligence(s) as a plural, contested, and deeply political concept.Starting from a working definition of intelligence as the capacity to navigate a domain toward ends, the conversation quickly fans out: human intelligence, non-human animal intelligence, machine intelligence, and even the question of whether rivers, mountains, or viruses might exhibit their own forms of intelligent “fit.” Our co-hosts wrestle with familiar philosophical fault lines—rationality versus embodiment, instinct versus understanding, adaptation versus explanation—while keeping a sharp eye on the troubling history of intelligence as a ranking device tied to exclusion, hierarchy, and power.Drawing on phenomenology, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, AI ethics, and everyday examples ranging from crows to chatbots, the episode asks what’s really at stake when we measure, compare, or deny intelligence. Is intelligence best understood as a single scale, or as an ecology of overlapping capacities shaped by bodies, environments, and worlds? And if machines are already intelligent in their own way, what follows for how we understand ourselves?Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/intelligences---------------------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★