When Leigh's cat Sugar was dying of congestive heart failure, the vet's office offered her something almost no human being will ever be offered: the chance to hold her, to tell her she was loved and thank her, and to be present while a doctor helped her die without pain, without fear, and not alone. Afterward, Leigh's first thought was, I hope my death is this good. Most of us won't get one. We will die in a hospital bed, wired to machines, running up a bill somebody we love will inherit — and almost nobody says that's what they want. Meanwhile, the last year of an American life is the most profitable one, and a dignified death has quietly become a luxury good.

Is there — should there be — such a thing as a "right to die," the dark companion of the right to life we all assume we already have? We already honor a patient's refusal of life-sustaining treatment; we let people sign DNRs, decline resuscitation, have the respirator removed. Is there any principled reason to honor that autonomy everywhere except the one place a person tries to use it? What is the "sound mind" requirement actually screening for, given that wanting to die was long treated as disqualifying all by itself? And can we talk seriously about dying with dignity inside a system that barely guarantees anyone the right to live with dignity?

Grab a drink — no hemlock cocktails, please — and join us as we ask what it would take to receive the deaths we already afford our pets.

Content note: this episode discusses death, dying, end-of-life decision-making, euthanasia, and suicide throughout, at times in personal terms. In the U.S., the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text.

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

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BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.

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What's the difference between a rule that describes the world and one that governs it? Leigh, Jen, and Bob start with a complaint about Robert's Rules of Order and end up in the deep end: the categorical imperative, the social contract, the rule of law, and what it would mean to live without any rules at all.

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

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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.

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Gilles Deleuze is multifaceted and his works seemingly heteroclite, which has made it difficult to assess what a “Deleuzian” philosophy may be, even if there are a host of philosophical concepts that bear his signature.  Most secondary works on him tend to approach him through one of his works on the canonical philosophers, arguing, for example, that Deleuze is and always was a Nietzschean or a Bergsonian or a Spinozist.  But these seem to miss what it means to be properly “Deleuzian.”

What would it mean to read Deleuze “conceptually” and systematically across all of his works?  Is there some unifying thread that not only gathers together his philosophical concerns, but also shows us how to read all of his monographic works from start to finish and reveal what a Deleuzian philosophy is?

Our guest today, Nathan Widder of Royal Holloway University, proposes a possible way to navigate this dilemma.   For Nathan, the concept that constitutes this guiding thread is the concept of sense.  From his earliest published work–an essay reviewing Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence–to his two magni opei (Difference and Repetition, and the aptly named The Logic of Sense), the concept of sense is, according to Nathan, the organizing conceptual principle that drives all of Deleuze’’s analyses and animates his philosophical questioning.   

So, what is the concept of sense in the work of Deleuze?  What does he mean by it, and how does it organize his philosophical project?  These are the questions we tackle in this week’s episode – and if you’’e worried that you do not know much about Deleuze, worry no more, because neither did we.   But thanks to Nathan and his new book Deleuze and the Logic of Sense (SUNY Press, 2026) we all learned a lot – and so will you.

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

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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.

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We are living through the most intense public argument about gender in living memory, and somehow managing to conduct it without agreeing on what the most basic terms mean. The word cisgender — or just cis — is either standard vocabulary on HR onboarding documents and medical intake forms or, depending on where you live and who holds power at the moment, possibly a slur, possibly banned from government buildings, possibly both at once. The word has been around for thirty years, but its history is largely unknown to the people who argue or legislate against it. What most people are currently fighting about today is a simplified, mainstream version of the concept that traveled a long way from its origins before arriving in the culture war.

In this episode, we sit down with Perry Zurn, Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. Zurn's new book, Cisgender: Disorienting a Category (Duke University Press, 2026), is the first sustained philosophical and historical account of how the term cis entered the gender lexicon, where it came from, what it was supposed to do, and what it has actually done. Drawing on unplumbed archives, interviews with early trans community figures, and parallel conversations in Argentina and Brazil that predate the American discourse, Zurn argues that cis is more useful as a name for a set of norms and privileges than as a description of any person's inner life. Moreover, the category, when pressed hard enough, begins to unravel in philosophically generative ways.

Grab a drink and join us as we pull apart a word everyone uses, almost no one can define, and that is more radical, more contested, and far more philosophically interesting than the version currently being banned from Twitter.

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

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SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/hotelbarsessions (Or by contributing one-time donations here: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/donate/)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website (hotelbarpodcast.com) for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts through our "Contact Us" page on the website!

Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!

Sports are one of the few remaining arenas of public life where tens of millions of people voluntarily agree to care about the same thing at the same time. As the World Cup reminds us every four years, sports can build identities, drive economies, organize civic loyalties, and transform old geopolitical wounds into something that at least resembles a game. Whether you played Little League, follow your city's team with religious devotion, or find the whole spectacle baffling, sports have philosophical stakes that run deeper than the scoreboard.

What actually makes something a sport — and does the answer matter? What does that tell us about fairness, rules, and what it means to win? Can fandom build genuine community, or is it just tribalism? And when institutions like the NCAA funnel the passions sports inspire into donor pipelines and broadcast deals, what gets lost and who gets exploited?

Grab a drink and join us as we step onto the field with Aristotle, Iris Marion Young, William James, and Bernard Suits to find out whether the philosophy of sport is worth playing.

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

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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, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!

In the spring of 2026, Anthropic released to the public what it described as its most capable AI model to date... and then the U.S. government shut it down seventy-two hours later. That subsequent sequence of events, both strange and almost operatic in its timing, is the kind of thing we might genuinely call "unprecedented." It was also a crystalline illustration of something philosophers have been decrying for decades, namely, the difference between performing ethical responsibility and actually exercising it.

What does it mean to reason morally about the risks of a technology about which we do not yet fully understand its potential future impacts? Given that a very small number of decisionmakers will shape the conditions of life for everyone else for the next several decades, what do they owe to the people who will bear the consequences of those decisions without having had any say in them? When "ethical AI" has become a brand strategy rather than a careful, historically-informed and theoretically-grounded practice, how do we hold anyone accountable for the gap between what they say and what they do?

Grab a drink and join our co-host Leigh M. Johnson as she asks us to consider exactly how sloppy the current "AI ethics" discourse is, what moral reasoning actually requires. and why the people who most need to be doing it seem to be the ones least interested in the task.

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

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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, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!

We tend to think of art as something you look at — a canvas on a wall, an object behind velvet rope, something that holds still while you decide what you think of it. But a tradition in contemporary art has spent the better part of sixty years insisting that this picture is wrong. The artwork isn't the object. It's your body moving through the space it creates. In this minibar episode, Bob Vallier draws on his work in phenomenology to make the case that some of the stranger, more provocative, and occasionally illegal-by-contemporary-standards experiments in post-war art are best understood not as aesthetic puzzles to be solved but as invitations to notice something you're always already doing: being a body in a world that pushes back.
 
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/artandphenomenology
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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, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!

The HBS co-hosts are diligently at work prepping for Season 16 so, in the meantime, enjoy this "Minibar" episode from Jennifer Kling explaining the merits and demerits of employing Hanlon's Razor in our everyday lives!

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/hanlons-razor

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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, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!

While our co-hosts are on a short break between seasons, enjoy this REPLAY episode of one of our favorite conversations from Season 15 with  Dr. Robert T. Valgenti, philosopher and professor at the Culinary Institute of America, who dropped by the hotel bar to chat with us about food, the “gastronomic event,” the ethics and politics of cooking and eating, and what it means to be human.

Bon appétit!

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/food
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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, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!

What does it mean to say that visibility is a trap? Why does the simple awareness that we might be watched work on us so effectively that we end up policing ourselves better than any guard ever could? And if disciplinary power now operates through every camera in every pocket and every satellite overhead, is there anywhere left that isn't already inside the panopticon?

For the final episode of Season 15, we close out the season with a deep dive into Michel Foucault's "Panopticism" from Discipline and Punish. Bob walks us through the architectural innovation at the heart of Foucault's argument: Jeremy Bentham's prison design, in which a single guard tower makes every prisoner visible while keeping the guard himself unseen. From there the conversation turns to what panopticism looks like in our own moment — Princeton's recent return to exam proctors, Elon Musk's brief tenure at DOGE and the IRS data he walked away with, the meta-glasses recording strangers on the street, and the hundred thousand satellites now orbiting overhead. Jen presses on why disciplinary power is scarier than sovereign power, precisely because it arrives dressed as benevolence. Leigh asks whether digging in on privacy in the digital age is already a losing bet that concedes too much to the logic of surveillance.

Grab a drink and join us as we ask who exactly is watching the watchers... and whether any tolerated margin of criminality is left in which to hide.

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

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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, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!