This week’s episode of Hotel Bar Sessions brings political theorist Laura K. Field (author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right) into the bar to talk about the intellectuals cranking the rhetoric up to eleven while insisting they’re just “doing Great Books.” We follow the trail from Straussian seminar rooms and conservative think tanks to Trump rallies and “no kings” protests, asking what happens when a self-styled aristocracy of the mind decides liberal democracy is played out.

Field guides us through the angry energy behind this movement, the “furious minds” driving it, and why she turns to Aeschylus’ treatment of the ancient Furies (in his Oresteia trilogy) and Abraham Lincoln’s Dred Scott speech to think about justice, vengeance, and the dangers of sacralizing politics. Along the way we talk MAGA as quasi-religion, liberalism as a way of life, why so many young men are adopting Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life, and what it means to refuse the invitation to become furious.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/furrious-minds
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SUPPORT Hotel Bar 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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The imagination has regularly been subordinated to so-called "rational" or "scientific" models of thought. This week, we're joined by Stephen T. Asma (Columbia College, Chicago), who argues that imagination has deep, perhaps pre-linguistic, roots that ought to be recovered. What if we re-centered the powers of imagination, rooted in imagistic thinking and bodily gestures (like dance), instead of dismissing them as mere "fancy"?

Drawing on the esoteric tradition, Asma leads us through an interesting alt-history of human thought and, in doing so, gives us reason to pause and re-think our prejudice against imaginative thinking.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/imagination-with-stephen-asma
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SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar 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!

This week’s episode of Hotel Bar Sessions on the topic of comedy is a gut buster, not least because one of your co-hosts pretends to be a stand-up comedian at night-- the only job for a philosopher that pays less than being an adjunct professor!

Comedy is a historically and philosophically rich topic, starting with primitive hominids drawing penises on cave walls. Our cohosts' begin with Plato, then try to anticipate what Aristotle might have said about comedy (it would not have been funny!), before turning to the formalist aesthetic of 20th C. stand-up and the banality of crowd-work. We ask: what makes something funny? Is there anything that can never be funny? What does comedy do for us, socially and politically?

Join us for drinks and a few laughs as we discuss an art form that deserves much more philosophical attention.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/episode-202-comedy
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SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar 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!