Michael Patrick Lynch
Special guest
Michael Patrick Lynch is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is the director of the Humanities Institute and director of the New England Humanities Consortium. His work concerns truth, democracy, public discourse and the ethics of technology.
Lynch's newest book is Know-it-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture. His other books include, The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data, In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy, Truth as One and Many and the New York Times Sunday Book Review Editor’s pick, True to Life.
The recipient of the Medal for Research Excellence from the University of Connecticut’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, he is the Principal Investigator for Humility & Conviction in Public Life, a $7 million project aimed at understanding and encouraging meaningful public discourse funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the University of Connecticut. A contributor to the New York Times “The Stone” weblog, Lynch’s work has been profiled in The New Yorker, The Washington Post and Wired (among others). He speaks regularly to both academic and non-academic audiences, and has appeared at such venues as TED, The Nantucket Project, Chautauqua, and South by Southwest.
For inquiries about public speaking engagements, please contact Nasya Al-Saidy at [email protected].
Michael Patrick Lynch has been a guest on 1 episode.
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Episode 170: Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture, with Michael Patrick Lynch
August 16th, 2019 | 1 hr 5 mins
My guest is Michael Patrick Lynch. His newest book is "Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture." Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, Michael Patrick Lynch delivers a trenchant philosophical take on digital culture and its tendency to make us into dogmatic know-it-alls. The internet―where most shared news stories are not even read by the person posting them―has contributed to the rampant spread of “intellectual arrogance.” In this culture, we have come to think that we have nothing to learn from one another; we are rewarded for emotional outrage over reflective thought; and we glorify a defensive rejection of those different from us.