Hotel Bar Sessions

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

The HBS hosts discuss legal personhood and rights for rivers, lakes, and mountains with Dr. Stewart Motha.

In most discussions about extending rights or legal personhood to non-humans, the focus tends to be on robots/machines or non-human animals. However, given our current global climate crisis, we have good reason to ask: isn't it time to devote more attention to the rights-- and perhaps legal and moral "personhood"-- of natural entities? What sorts of protections might be extended by the law if our notion of personhood were expanded?

This is not an easily answered question, of course, because natural entities still face the challenge of being accorded "legal standing" in order to bring suit in their own names. (Names that we humans have given them!) Some progress has been made on this front by organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, who have been granted the right of "representational standing" by various courts, but we're still a long way from practically negotiating our understanding of the difference between physis (nature) and nomos (law) in a way that actually protects Nature.

This week, we are joined by Dr. Stewart Motha, Executive Dean of Birkbeck Law School, University of London to discuss the challenge and potential promise of extending legal personhood to natural entities. Dr. Motha is the author of Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence (2018) and the editor of Democracy's Empire: Sovereignty, Law, and Violence (2007). His research explores the multiple forms and sources of legal norms (heteronomy) as a counter-narrative to liberal accounts of the autonomy of law, including challenges to the opposition between life/non-life. He is the host of the podcast COUNTERSIGN and can be found on Twitter at @MothaStewart.

Full episode notes available at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-72-the-rights-of-nature-with-stewart-motha

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The HBS hosts talk with Dr. Joel Michael Reynolds about what bodies are afforded and denied.
As we come to recognize more and more the occlusions that occur in, and often constitute, philosophy and its history, attention to an ableist presupposition in philosophy has come to the fore. Much as with feminist theory or queer theory or race theory, disability theory not only works to expose the ableist presuppositions of philosophy but also to alter philosophy for the better by the inclusion of the formerly excluded. Why are affordances-- social, political, moral, and physical-- made for some types of bodies, but denied to others? Have we yet grasped what different types of bodies can really do? What is the difference between a "disability" and an "impairment"? To what degree is our category "disability" more philosophical than it is corporeal?

Our guest for this episode, Dr. Joel Reynolds, is the perfect person with whom to talk about these questions and issues! Dr. Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Senior Advisor to The Hastings Center, Faculty Scholar of The Greenwall Foundation, and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program. He is the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society from Oxford University Press. In 2022, he published The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality.

You can read/download a transcript of this episode at this link.

Full episode notes are available at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-67-rethinking-disability-with-joel-michael-reynolds

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If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.

You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.

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 Board of Trustees. He frequently appears in the media, as a columnist for TIME Magazine and as an MSNBC contributor on programs like Morning Joe and Deadline Whitehouse with Nicolle Wallace. He also regularly appears on Meet the Press on Sundays. Combining a scholar’s knowledge of history, a political commentator’s take on the latest events, and an activist’s passion for social justice, Glaude challenges all of us to examine our collective American conscience.

This week, the HBS hosts chat with Dr. Glaude about the role and the history of the public intellectual in America, the difference between the public intellectual and the “thought-leader” or “influencer,” and what it takes to be a public intellectual in the 21st Century.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-61-the-public-intellectual/

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If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, make sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.

You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.

The HBS hosts argue for the merits of studying the history of philosophy.

In a recent essay, Hanno Sauer argued against the importance, for philosophy, of the history of philosophy. In summary, he presented a positivistic, scientistic model of philosophy, namely, that like physics, biology, and chemistry, philosophy has actually “made progress” on many of the issues that philosophy struggled with from Thales until relatively recently. Because of this progress, Sauer's argument goes, we do not need to study the history of philosophy. The model of the sciences shows why this is the case: in biology courses, no one is struggling with Aristotle, Linnaeus, or Mendel. In chemistry, no one pays attention to the history of alchemy, the theory of phlogiston, or the ether. In physics, no student learns Aristotle’s theory of why bodies “fall,” or the medieval notion of “impetus.” Is Sauer right that philosophy has similarly progressed? Should philosophy leave its history to the historians? Then, beyond Sauer, we can add that the history of philosophy is a history of both dead white guys and the history of the victors. If the history of philosophy is ethno-centric, and therefore racist, if it is phallo-centric and therefore patriarchal, why should philosophy continue to engage it?

Or is there something philosophically relevant about the history of philosophy?

Full episode notes available at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-79-the-history-of-philosophy
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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.