Starr Forum: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

When:
Thursday, Nov 15, 2018 4:30p -
6:00p

Where:
MIT 26-100
60 VASSAR ST
Cambridge, MA 02139

EventScheduled OfflineEventAttendanceMode

Admission:
FREE

Categories:
Innovation, Lectures & Conferences

Event website:
http://calendar.mit.edu/event/starrforum_enlightenmentnow

A book talk with Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind.


Pinker is an experimental cognitive psychologist and a popular writer on language, mind, and human nature. Pinker’s research on vision, language, and social relations has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science. He has also received eight honorary doctorates, several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard, and numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and often writes for The New York Times, Time, and other publications. He has been named Humanist of the Year, Foreign Policy’s “100 Global Thinkers,” and Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”


Please note: this event will NOT be live-streamed on our Facebook page or recorded. We apologize for any inconvenience.


About the book:
"My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates


If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.


Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.
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Free & open to the public | Refreshments served


For more information or accessibility accommodations please contact [email protected].
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11/15/2018 16:30:00 11/15/2018 18:00:00 America/New_York Starr Forum: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress A book talk with Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind. Pinker is an experimental cog... MIT 26-100, Cambridge, MA 02139 false MM/DD/YYYY

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