Michael Lynch

Publishing NOW: Publishing about Race Now

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Publishing NOW: Publishing about Race Now. Lewis R. Gordon, author of Fear of Black Consciousness (2022) in conversation with Michael P. Lynch. January 31, 2022, 4:00pm. Live. Online. Registration required.

Publishing NOW

Publishing about Race Now

Lewis R. Gordon (Philosophy, UConn)

in conversation with Michael P. Lynch

January 31, 2022, 4:00pm

Live • Online • Registration required.

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In conversation with Michael P. Lynch, Lewis R. Gordon will discuss his new book, Fear of Black Consciousness (2022), “a groundbreaking work that positions Black consciousness as a political commitment and creative practice, richly layered through art, love, and revolutionary action.”

Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He works in the areas of Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. He has written particularly extensively on Africana and Black existentialism, postcolonial phenomenology, race and racism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon.

ACCESS NOTE

This event will offer automated captioning. If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Michael Lynch Speaks with BBC about Facts and Arrogance

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UConn Humanities Institute director, Michael Lynch, joins a team of experts to speak with BBC World Service’s The Inquiry about the role of facts, arrogance, and tribalism in our societies. This episode strives to understand why we have such a great capacity to ignore facts and to believe them only when they match our convictions and what are the political, psychological, and social consequences of this increasingly entrenched behavior?

UCHI Director Lynch Honored at the BOT Distinguished Professor’s Reception

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The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute director, Michael Lynch, has been officially named a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at UConn. This award is the highest honor that UConn bestows upon those faculty who have demonstrated excellence in teaching, research, and service. Michael Lynch and the other recipients were honored during a reception hosted by the Board of Trustees earlier in December. Other recipients this year included Emmanouil N. Anagnostou – Civil and Environmental Engineering and Cathy Schlund-Vials – English and Asian/Asian American Studies.

“Humility In Politics” Event Kicks Off UConn’s Public Discourse Research Project

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Humility and vulnerability are no longer values that are rewarded in the political arena, and it’s up to individuals, and their relationships, to begin a sea change that could “trickle up” into political leadership.

That was the message Tuesday evening as prominent political figures, journalists, educators, academics and nonprofit leaders came together for a public forum, titled “Humility in Politics,” in Washington, D.C.

Panelists and moderators from the Humility in Politics forum at the Folger Shakespeare Theater was held on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 in Washington, DC Photos by GH Studios. © Garrett Hubbard 2016

The event, sponsored by UConn’s Humanities Institute and a $5.75 million investment in UConn by the John Templeton Foundation, kicked off a three-year research initiative, aptly named The Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.

The project aims to investigate how intellectual humility – through being aware of our own innate biases and responses to new evidence – can overcome current political divisiveness.

“This is an unprecedented attempt to apply humanities and social science research to solve problems in the political sphere,” said Michael Lynch, professor of philosophy and director of the Humanities Institute, in his opening remarks.

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Director of the Humanities Institute Michael Lynch, explores the dangerous insecurity of American Exceptionalism.

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The Danger of ‘American Exceptionalism’

The siren call of American exceptionalism ends up encouraging only demagoguery.

By Michael P. Lynch | Contributor

Aug. 14, 2016, at 7:00 a.m.

Over the last month, there has been a steady drumbeat of talk about America’s “greatness” – whether it was making it great again (Donald Trump) or already being the greatest country on Earth (the Obamas and Hillary Clinton). Yet what does it really mean to say America is “great” – now or in the future? Not surprisingly, it depends whom you ask: their politics, their views on the health of the economy and so on. But differences on the meaning of “greatness” go deeper as well and often concern a single idea that is of increasing national importance: American Exceptionalism. read more

Michael Patrick Lynch reading/signing – Tuesday April 26, 2016 – 5:30pm to 7:00pm, UConn Co-op Bookstore

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Tuesday, April 26, 2016 – 5:30pm to 7:00pm

UConn Co-op Bookstore

With far-reaching implications, this urgent treatise promises to revolutionize our understanding of what it means to be human in the digital age.
We used to say “seeing is believing”; now googling is believing. With 24/7 access to nearly all of the world’s information at our fingertips, we no longer trek to the library or the encyclopedia shelf in search of answers. We just open our browsers, type in a few keywords and wait for the information to come to us. Indeed, the Internet has revolutionized the way we learn and know, as well as how we interact with each other. And yet this explosion of technological innovation has also produced a curious paradox: even as we know more, we seem to understand less.
Michael P. Lynch is a writer and professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he directs the Humanities Institute. He is the author or editor of seven books, including, most recently, In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy, as well as Truth as One and Many and the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice True to Life. The recipient of the Medal for Research Excellence from the University of Connecticut’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Lynch has held grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times‘s The Stone series.

 

In the NYT “Googling Is Believing: Trumping the Informed Citizen” by UCHI Director Michael P. Lynch.

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Googling Is Believing: Trumping the Informed Citizen

By
Michael P. Lynch

About a week before he used the national political stage to ask viewers to think about Donald Trump’s “finger” size, Marco Rubio told the audience during another recent Republican presidential debate to Google “Donald Trump and Polish workers.” They did.

The worry is no longer about who controls content. It is about who controls the flow of that content.

Rubio wanted voters to see news stories about Trump illegally hiring undocumented Polish workers more than 35 years ago to demolish a building to make way for Trump Tower. Searches for those terms, and the fraudulent “Trump University,” shot way up. It was like a public version of the now ubiquitous phenomenon of everyone whipping out smartphones to verify a disputed fact at a party or meeting. Not that it did much good in this case; as numerous commentators have noted, Trump and many of his supporters don’t seem particularly worried about minor annoyances like “facts.” (For the record, PolitiFact, which checks the veracity of politicians’ statements, judged Rubio’s charge to be “half true.”)

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http://nyti.ms/1QMuQ75