Becoming Human

What is the Way? The Way, or Tao, is the central mystery of life, according to the Tao Te Ching, one of the greatest works of Chinese philosophy.

So how do we find the Tao? What does the Way look like? This video answers that question by introducing the Tao Te Ching, and the mystery of Return... Join me at the Becoming Human Project today!

Is life a momentary fragment, a meaningless event? Or Is life an eternal and glorious process and event?

These two different ideas of life—life as intrinsically meaningless or life as intrinsically meaningful—are connected to our emotional reactions and ultimately our idea of time and our world.

Chef Arturo Franco Camacho is the Culinary Director and Executive Chef of three of New Haven's best restaurants: Geronimo's Southwestern Kitchen, Shell & Bones Oyster Bar, and Camacho Garage. His restaurants are not only a destination for great food but fantastic atmosphere.

Trained at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), the world's premiere culinary college, he has worked as a chef at restaurants in Spain, France, and London, and spent five years as chef aboard the world's top cruise ship, the Queen Elizabeth II.

In this conversation, Chef Franco talks about his love of cooking with his mom and grandmother in Mexico at an early age, his brief time in dentist's school, his travels around the world, and how, despite training and working in top kitchens, he was denied work in Hew Haven as a chef, which lead him to create New Haven's first taco cart on Yale's campus.

Science is the only tradition that actively admits its own errors, gaining deeper knowledge by overcoming its tendency to orthodoxy. This happens when scientific revolutions shatter existing paradigms. The process begins with anomalies, potential facts that do not fit the paradigm. The physicist Sabine Hossenfelder sees many anomalies in current physics, and argues that physics today has lost its way because physics has followed the wrong rules, rules of beauty rather than rules proper to science. Hossenfelder's intervention in physics illustrates the profound relevance of Thomas Kuhn's discussion of rules and facts in science.

Kuhn explores how scientific facts grow and change, how fact and theory are finally inseparable, and how debates about the rules of science emerge in revolutionary periods, like our own. I use Hossenfelder in conversation with Kuhn's "The Priority of Paradigms" in Ep. 6 of my series to show facts are far more complex than we realize, and this is why today our partisanship manifests as a world of no shared facts. Science shows the way forward.

Episode 6, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: An Introduction

According to Thomas Kuhn, the most mature sciences have only a limited tolerance for novelty. Contrary to the common image of scientific progress as a continuous series of discoveries, Kuhn shows it's actually the progress of paradigms towards ever greater precision. Progress in normal science thus does not aim at novelty but the enrichment of the depth and concreteness of the theory.

Drawing on the the insights of Edward Witten's defense of string theory, Episode 5 of Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions explores the concept of novelty and discovery in Section IV: "The Nature of Normal Science."

The longing for a complete science is one of the great dreams of modernity. Is such a complete science possible, and can Kuhn's idea of a paradigm help us realize it? This episode explores the origins and power of the search for completeness and unity in Western science, and reveals the unexpected spiritual origins of this ideal.

Ep. 4, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: An Introduction

Thomas Kuhn coined the concept of a paradigm to describe the unique achievement of science. Since Kuhn, the terms "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" have entered into popular culture, but what really is a paradigm? How does it connect to normal science? And can it help us distinguish real science from pseudo-science? All these questions, and more, are explored in this episode of my series on Kuhn.

Episode 3, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: An Introduction

Thomas Kuhn argued that history would change our image of science, causing a revolution we are still unprepared to face. This Kuhnian revolution challenges traditional epistemology by arguing we must look to science itself to understand how knowledge develops, and looking to science demands facing history. This episode of my course on Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions explores these issues, and more.

What is Science? What happened in the Scientific Revolution? How does Science progress? Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the most influential book in the history and philosophy of science, addressing these and other key questions. This public series offers an introduction to this major work and includes a discussion of Kuhn's core ideas: paradigm shifts, normal and revolutionary science, and more.

On Nov. 11, 1855, after an astoundingly rich yet brief life, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard died. He requested his epitaph read simply: "That Individual." The "single individual" is the soul of Kierkegaard's work, but what does it mean to become an individual? This final episode of Kierkegaard: The Poet of Existence, explores the mystery of freedom and true individuality, and how they relate to the Eternal.

COURSE RELEASE 8pm EST 10.27.2023

Course Link: www.samuelloncar.com/courses

Course Code: BECOMINGHUMANWITHSK

Series Description

Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and religious thinker, created one of the most consequential bodies of writing in human history. One of the greatest literary writers, he is also widely regarded as the most important philosophers and theologians to create much of the 20th century: movements like existentialism, modern theology, and even forms of modern nihilism can be traced back to the work of Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard is known as a delightful and difficult figure; like Socrates, he is ironic and hard to understand. He is also my first great teacher, so to honor his personal and historical influence, I am doing an 8 episode series on Søren Kierkegaard: The Poet of Existence.