Hotel Bar Sessions - The History of Philosophy

The History of Philosophy

01/13/23 • 57 min

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Hotel Bar Sessions

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.

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

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

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

Previous Episode

Revolutionary Mathematics (with Justin Joque)

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.

Next Episode

Attention and Distraction

The HBS hosts focus their attention on... oh, look, a squirrel!

It is said that we are living in an attention economy, an age in which attention has become both a scarce resource and a source of wealth. Devices and apps do everything in their power to solicit our attention and keep us glued to our screens, turning minutes scrolling and clicks into revenue. Because of this demand on our attention, distraction has become an ongoing problem; from the road to the classroom we are worried that we are not truly paying attention. Is it time to pay attention to attention, to reflect on how we perceive what we perceive and why? What might it mean to reclaim our attention?

Full episode notes at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-80-attention-and-distraction

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