About
One rainy day on a tiny Okinawa island called Yagaji, my grandmother, Akiko Furugen Kasprzak, set my feet on the path of philosophy because of her piety.
All of my work is dedicated to her life and memory.
(1935-2024)
Born in Athens, Greece, Samuel’s ancestors’ give him global roots: in Okinawa, Japan, among the Chippewa (or Ojibwe) people, and in Eastern Europe.
Samuel’s diverse background motivated his search for a truth that would respect his upbringing but answer his hardest questions, leading him to discover, at age 14, an ancient philosophy text that converted him to philosophy as a way of life.
Through years of research and practice, motivated by that moment, Samuel has discovered a path in the buried past that opens onto a better future.
He walks that path to bridge the ancient and the modern worlds by recovering philosophy as a way of becoming human in a posthuman age.
Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale) is a philosopher and scholar curating
and creating new knowledge at the intersection
of science, religion, art, and technology.
As an applied philsopher, consultant, and speaker, Samuel has worked with clients like the United Nations, Oliver Wyman, Red Bull Arts, and Flagship Pioneering.
His work has been read at Google, taught in classes and universities across the world, and is translated into Portuguese, Chinese, and Farsi.
He’s the Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books, Founder and Director of the Institute for the Meanings of Science, Architect and Co-founder of The Writing College, and host of Becoming Human: A Show for a Species in Transition, featuring his work as a scholar and interviewer.
He has taught and lectured in America and Europe, and offers consultations, classes, and workshops on science, philosophy, religion, and technology. His book, Philosophy as Religion from Plato to Posthumanism, is appearing with Columbia University Press.
Samuel’s scholarship focuses on the ancient-modern continuum in metaphysics and theology, the German tradition, and the relationship between science, philosophy, technology, and religion. While earning his Ph.D. at Yale, Samuel was a Junior Fellow at the MacMillan Center’s Initiative on Religion, Politics, and Society, a John H. Hord Fellow, and the recipient of a Baron Foundation Grant for his research on antisemitism.
In all his work, he blends scholarly and creative concerns and integrates separated spaces that need each other's wisdom. His interdisciplinary intellectual work, martial arts, and BioPoetics practice reflect a commitment to advancing human understanding and evolution through a synthesis of music, mind, body, and spirit.
His projects orbit around a few big questions, all concerned with what it means to be human in an era dominated by technology and globalization.
Samuel’s projects stem from five fundamental questions, all profoundly affecting and inflecting our conceptions of humanity:
(1) What happened, and is happening, to religion in the modern age, and how does it relate to modern science?
(2) Why did theology and metaphysics begin a slow death with the rise of modern science, and why was metaphysics' greatest advocate in the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger, both a Nazi and an opponent of humanism and technology?
(3) Are humans capable of adequately recognizing their own historicity while still believing in truth, and possessing awareness of and control over the whole earth without destroying it?
Samuel’s search for answers to these modern questions has led me to two, even more basic, questions about the ancient world:
(4) How did a Jewish messianic sect in the first century turn into a non-Jewish religion, become the imperial cult of the Roman Empire, and end up the most persistent producer and perpetrator of prejudice and violence against the Jews in human history, culminating in the Holocaust, and how has anti-Semitism affected other forms of prejudice, like Islamophobia?
(5) How did philosophy, an ancient way of life rooted in spiritual practices, and integrating practical and intellectual skill, poetry and theory, art and science, transform into a mere academic discipline, into something which often seems, impractical, unpoetic, unscientific, and reserved for a cognitive elite, and could we change this, bringing philosophy closer to its origins, and thus to religion and science?
Martial Arts
