Becoming Human: Origins | How Philosophy Remade Science and Religion
Becoming Human: Origins tells the story of how an atheistic revolution in philosophy, beginning with Socrates and Jesus, remade religion and science, and set the stage for our post-human age. It argues that the dominant story of reason, science, and religion is a modern myth, and must be replaced if we are to make real progress.
The series begins by showing Socrates was a revolutionary religious martyr and ends with the death of God and Reason, revealing the common connection between Protestant Christianity, the Enlightenment, Marxism, and Science. These movements are perceived as radically contradictory, but the source of their conflict is their common ancestry: they are all part of a single atheistic narrative—one that has never been told.
Episodes
1: Religious Atheists: Philosophy's Untold Story
2: The Myth of Secular Philosophy: Socrates as a Religious Martyr
3: Jesus the Philosopher? A Jewish Revolution
4: Magicians and Philosophers: From Empedocles to Jesus
5: A Murderous Logic: Antisemitism, Christianity, and Ancient Philosophy
6: The Atheist Revolution That Changed the World
7: The Birth of the Modern World: Protestantism and Atheism
8: The Triumph of Reason
9: Science as Salvation and the Death of Reason
10: Revolution after the Death of God
Series Note: This series launched the Becoming Human Project on March 11, 2020—a date I chose well in advance.
Your purchase supports the Becoming Human Project.
10% of all course purchases go to scholarship funds.
The Soul, the World, and the Gods: Introduction to Becoming Human
This 3-episode “crash course” is a rich and concise introduction to philosophical psychology, cosmology, and theology.
This series explores how the soul is connected to the cosmos and how our view of the universe shapes our concept and care of the environment, offering my response to one of our most pressing concerns: How do we sustain the proper care of earth and our own species?
Essential Questions:
What is the soul and do we have one?
What is the cosmos?
What is the relationship between the soul, the cosmos, and the gods?
Why should I care and how can this knowledge help me?
Your purchase supports the Becoming Human Project.
10% of all course purchases go to scholarship funds.
The Matrix of Your Mind: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
“You feel the mind clawing at the invisible walls of its prison.”
Plato’s "Allegory of The Cave" is the most famous story in Western philosophy.
This 3-episode course shows how Plato’s allegory gives us insight into how the world is an illusion, how it is real, and how to know the difference.
Developing a critical social epistemology, the course connects Plato's teaching to modern marketing, psychological operations, conspiracy theories, and mass deception.
It offers a concise introduction to Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology, while revealing the essential spiritual dimension of philosophy as a practice of liberation, presenting the essentials of my approach to epistemology as a form of applied philosophy.
*Prerequisite for Psy Ops: Psychological Warfare as a Global Epistemic Regime, forthcoming by email application to those on The Matrix of Your Mind purchase list.
Your purchase supports the Becoming Human Project.
10% of all course purchases go to scholarship funds.
The Mystery of Existence: A New Interpretation of Martin Heidegger's Sein Und Zeit
“ I'm a philosopher who teaches in the university, and have been studying Heidegger for 30 years, and your 12-lecture course has literally transformed my understanding of Sein und Zeit. This course is invaluable. Thank you so much."
— Professor Aliman S.
Haunted by Hamlet’s question, “To be or not to be,” humans wander the world oblivious to the meaning of their own existence. A century ago, in a period of global turmoil, crisis, and despair, Martin Heidegger published a revolutionary response to the question, what does it mean to be, creating the foundations of Existentialism and reshaping philosophy, atheism, and religion across the world. His book, Sein und Zeit, was first translated into English in 1962 as Being and Time.
Based on a decade of research at Yale University by the philosopher Samuel Loncar, Ph.D., this original interpretation of Sein und Zeit, using only the German text and his own translations, reveals for the first time that Heidegger’s work has been mistranslated and therefore misunderstood as Being and Time.
Heidegger’s essential idea of what it means to be was obscured by his own fraught employment of ideas from the history of theology, the immense intellectual challenge of explaining Heidegger’s ideas, whose origins he sought to conceal, and the difficulty of rendering them in English. From Being to Time to Existence and Time: An Interpretation of Sein und Zeit presents a fundamental reevaluation of Heidegger’s major work by returning to the original German and integrating the hidden frameworks that shaped Heidegger.
Drawing on recent scholarship and his own work in the history of philosophy, science, and religion, Samuel Loncar provides a clear analysis of the central ideas of the book, giving any engaged listener the tools to understand the text for themselves and gain deeper insight into their own existence.
At the heart of his argument is his solution to the book’s central, but rarely discussed, mystery: Why did Martin Heidegger define the human being in the same terms Thomas Aquinas used to describe God?
In the end, we are led to a new vision of Heidegger, philosophy, theology, atheism, and our own existence.
Episodes
Part One: The Origins of Dasein and Existenz
1: The Narrative Logic of Existence and Time
2: Kierkegaard and the Origin of Dasein
3: Journey to Existenz: Part 1
4: Existence and Essence. Journey to Existenz: Part 2
Part Two: Existential Freedom: Authenticity and Temporality
5: From Kant to Heidegger: Autonomy and Normativity
6: Time as the Horizon of the Question of Sein
7: Tradition and Concealment: The Destruction of the History of Ontology
8: Consolidating the Silent Revolution: Heidegger and the Reparative Destruction of Ontology
Part Three: From the Afar to the Afar: Dasein, the World, and the Call of Conscience
9: The Task of Existence and the Uniqueness of Dasein
10: The Corrupted Root and the Lost World: The Fall of Dasein
11: From the Afar: Guilt, Dread, and the Call of Conscience
12: The Divine Mystery of Dasein and the End of Philosophy
Your purchase supports the Becoming Human Project.
10% of all course purchases go to scholarship funds.
Eros, Magic, and Immortality: The Myth of Diotima, Plato's Symposium
Science, magic, and immortality all lead back to the same ancient god: Eros.
The history of revolutionary advances in humanity, the Holy Grail, and Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity can all be traced back to a single myth, the Myth of Diotima, found in Plato’s Symposium—the most literarily intricate of all Plato’s dialogues.
Diotima, the mysterious wise woman from Mantinea, reveals to Socrates the secret of immortality. Central to that ancient mystery is Eros (Love).
This three episode series on the Symposium and the Myth of Diotima explores Socrates’ integrated vision of Eros that unifies the sensuality of the bedroom, the most rarified delights of mathematical epiphany, and the experience of mystical enlightenment.
Episodes
1: Magic, Science, and Love
2: Happiness and Erotica: Why Philosophers Make the Best Lovers
3: The Dialectic of Immortality: Beauty and Its Meaning
Series Note:
This course was taught live as the second part of my course: The Myths of Plato for Becoming Human Members.
Your purchase supports the Becoming Human Project.
10% of all course purchases go to scholarship funds.
The Existential Enlightenment: An Introduction to Søren Kierkegaard
From the rationalism of the Enlightenment to the dark freedom of Existentialism, there is a hidden path, passing through the abyss of human depravity into a new, scientifically rigorous psychology of the human self.
Often attacked or celebrated for his supposed irrationalism and attack on the Enlightenment, Kierkegaard is in fact the truest inheritor of the Enlightenment’s core values, for he shows how a commitment to rigorous rationality and human progress must confront the paradoxical essence of human existence.
The struggle of Enlightenment humanism to face the problem of evil, particularly after the Lisbon Earthquake, led to the immense yet unstable achievements of Immanuel Kant, who recognized a defect in human’s relationship to their own rationality. Seeking to uphold the sovereignty of Reason while preserving the insights of religion and morality, the contested inheritance of the Kantian legacy gave birth to German Idealism.
Situating Kierkegaard in the context of the Enlightenment, German Idealism, and the abyssal anthropology of Martin Luther, this course offers a detailed historical and philosophical introduction to Kierkegaard’s core ideas. Combining historical rigor with a strong focus on the existential and contemporary relevance of Kierkegaard, it is an ideal introduction for new and experienced students of Kierkegaard. The Existential Enlightenment offers insight into the meaning of history, the fate of religion, and the role of despair in human liberation, showing how the project of Existentialism and the Enlightenment meet in the path of Søren Kierkegaard.
Part I: Kierkegaard’s Context
1. The Enlightenment as a Civilizational Crisis
2. Christianity and Enlightenment
3. The Second Immanuel: Kant and German Idealism
4. The Shadows of the Cross: Luther’s Existential Influence on Kierkegaard
Part II: Leaping over Lessing’s Ditch: The Struggle for Historical Meaning
5. History and Existence: Lessing’s Ditch
6. The End of Miracles? Truths of Reason and Facts of History
7. Johannes Climacus and the Absolute Paradox
8. The Moment and the Eternal
Part III: The Self: Psychology and Transformation in The Sickness Unto Death
9. Point of No Return
10. The Unconscious Sickness
11. The Self as a Synthesis
12. Despair and Freedom: The Establishing Power of Existence
Your purchase supports the Becoming Human Project.
10% of all course purchases go to scholarship funds.
The Modern Crisis of Choice
Choices are stressful because choice is not freedom. Yet their subtle difference eludes us, leaving us stressed and confused.
In this 3-episide series, I share my understanding of the problem of freedom and offer you transformative insights, drawing on Aristotle, the Tao Te Ching, and Kierkegaard, that will help you move from choice to personal freedom, learning how to practice philosophy as a way of life.
Your purchase supports the Becoming Human Project.
10% of all course purchases go to scholarship funds.