Should we eat meat?

Humans have been eating other animals for close to 2.5 million years--a fact that is evidenced by cut traces on fossil animal bones, surviving stone tools, and analyses of our ancestors' teeth. Does this evolutionary fact render meat-eating physiologically necessary and morally justifiable? Our ancestors did a lot of things to survive; is that sufficient reason to continue the practice? How they obtained this meaty source of protein was arguably very different from the industrial practices of animal agriculture that are justifiably criticized for their cruelty to non-human sentient creatures and their contribution to the global climate crisis.

Can we as a species continue to eat meat? Or in doing so are we literally eating ourselves out of house and home? What about lab-grown Franken-meat, which Governor Ron DeSantis recently made illegal in the state of Florida? Is lab-grown meat a solution, or does it just feed the problem?

How and why is the unassuming "Impossible Burger" now a subject of the culture wars?

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-157-nature

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What can Frantz Fanon and Friedrich Nietzsche teach us about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict?

This week, we're joined by Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College) to discuss the final chapter of his most recent book The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (Bloomsbury, 2024)-- entitled "Zionist ressentiment, the Left, and the Palestinian Question"-- which offers a fresh lens through which to understand the complex affects and power dynamics that continue to fuel this ongoing struggle by focusing on what 19th C. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called ressentiment—a deep-seated feeling of injustice and grievance.

Zalloua unpacks how a collective sense of moral outrage on the part of Zionists has been deployed to shield Israel from criticism by accusing pro-Palestinian advocates, and the Left more generally, of a “new anti-Semitism.” He contrasts this with Palestinian ressentiment, which he frames as a legitimate response to the ongoing reality of settler-colonialism and displacement. His work both critiques the complicity of liberal Zionism in maintaining the status quo and challenges us to reframe the way we understand both Zionist and Palestinian anger.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-155-the-palestinian-question-with-zahi-zalloua

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If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Better yet, you can support this podcast by signing up to be one of our Patrons at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions!

Follow us on Twitter/X @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, on TikTok, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!

Philosophy has traditionally associated the feminine with matter, implying passivity. Why? And to what ends?

In our previous episode on materialism (Season 6, Episode 83), we came to see that in more recent years, two, often related, forms of materialism have been developed: “new materialism” and feminist materialism. New materialism tends toward a philosophical reflection on advances in science, particularly neuro-science and biology, but feminist materialism is not so easy to define, as it takes many forms.

There is, however, one unique issue that feminist materialists must contend with: the way that the tradition of philosophy in the West has associated "the feminine" with "matter" and contrasted matter with form, reason, and structure, evidencing yet another way in which the masculine has been privileged throughout the history of philosophy in the global North and West.

This week, we are joined by Dr. Emanuela Bianchi (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, NYU), expert in ancient philosophy and feminist philosophy, to find out what’s the matter with "matter"?

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-154-troubling-feminist-materialism-with-emmanuala-bianchi

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If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Better yet, you can support this podcast by signing up to be one of our Patrons at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions!

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Are we nearing the end of the "Age of Print"? And, if so, what comes next?

The concept of "the Gutenberg Parenthesis" suggests that the era of print – which began in the 15th century, when the printing press was developed by Johan Gutenberg, and extended to the 20th century, when radio and television muscled in – was a unique period for human communication. However, as this week's guest Jeff Jarvis argued in his book The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet(Bloomsbury, 2023), our emphasis on literacy is historically situated in ways we may find difficult to recognize. After, all, there were not always authors, publishers, editors, or newspapers-- all of which are recent inventions, in the grand scheme of things-- and we may in fact be coming to the end of this age.

Printing as a technology brought with it all manner of social, political, religious, and cultural effects that we now take for granted: for example, that we know who the "authorities" are, that grammar is fixed, that spelling must be consistent, or that our information must be curated for us. If the age of printing is coming to an end, and if the web is our "new" technology, then we might not be in the best position to understand its potentials and implications.

Some contours of the closing of this parenthesis are coming into view, to be sure, but the full extent is not entirely clear. What did print allow and what did it deny? What does the end of print mean for the ways in which we find and digest information about our world? What happens to our ability to communicate complex and subtle ideas? Are we headed toward the promised land... or the apocalypse?

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-153-the-gutenberg-parenthesis-with-jeff-jarvis

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If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Better yet, you can support this podcast by signing up to be one of our Patrons at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions!

Follow us on Twitter/X @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, on TikTok, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!

What counts as evidence? What makes it good or bad? How do we know?

In court cases, the prosecution, plaintiff, and defendant present “evidence” that something happened or didn’t happen, that it happened in one way or another, that someone did something or did not do something. Evidence is meant to point to something as-yet undetermined. The same goes with scientific evidence, statistical evidence, and anecdotal evidence. Yet, because evidence points to something unknown, sorting it out is often messy business! How do we judge whether evidence is trustworthy or good? Can we determine shared "rules" of evidence? And what about so-called "self-evident" things or claims? This week, we're diving right into this messy business of evidence.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/evidence

-------------------
If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Better yet, you can support this podcast by signing up to be one of our Patrons at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions!

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When did Jesus start hating immigrants and gays, and loving guns and capitalism?

Many Christians on the political left today no longer recognize the Jesus of the political right in the United States. Despite sharing a text and history, (at least) two dramatically different versions of "Jesus" have emerged in contemporary American Christian discourse, each reflecting a set of moral and political inferences presumably gleaned from the teachings of the historical Jesus, and each set of inferences containing its own problems with respect to verifiability, authenticity, and legitimacy.

This week, we are joined by internationally renowned Catholic scholar Dr. John D. Caputo, author of What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (2007), to re-trace the emergence of these seemingly incompatible iterations of "Jesus," and try to figure out whose Jesus works for whom.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-151-whose-jesus-with-john-d-caputo/

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If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Better yet, you can support this podcast by signing up to be one of our Patrons at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions!

Follow us on Twitter/X @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, on TikTok, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!

The HBS hosts struggle for recognition.

[NOTE: This is a REPLAY episode, first aired on August 11, 2023. The HBS hosts will be back with new episodes for Season 11 starting on September 13, 2024!]

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

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If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review!

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The HBS hosts ask Devin Shaw whether and how to punch Nazis.

[NOTE: This is a REPLAY episode, first aired on Jun2, 2023. The HBS hosts will be back with new episodes for Season 11 starting on September 13, 2024!]

Since at least the 2016 election the word fascism has emerged from the historical archive to contemporary political debates. This question has primarily been one about the identity of fascism, what are its minimal characteristics? To what extent can the Trump administration be considered fascist, and so on? We discussed some of this last season with Alberto Toscano. As much as this question of definition is important, a no less important question is what to do in the face of fascism. How to respond. It is on this point that the opposition to fascism divides rather sharply between those who argue that fascism must be countered with the norms of civil society, debated, discussed and defeated in the marketplace of ideas and those who argue that the violence of fascism must be met with counter-violence.

In this episode, we are joined by Devin Shaw, who teaches at Douglas College and is the author of Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy.

Full episode notes at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-95-punching-nazis

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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.