My latest video (released totally out of order and not intended to necessarily be watched in order) is titled: Leibniz the Optimist.

It covers Leibniz’s posthumous attacks by Voltaire in the Candide, but looked at from a wider historical perceptive. This wider perspective gets into Newton’s personal religious views and how they influenced his war with Leibniz. This war was what Voltaire was essentially involving himself in.

In fact, supporting evidence from Stanford’s Dr. Martin Evans shows that Voltaire was not even attacking Leibniz’s views per se. Rather, Voltaire was waging a war on metaphysics and certain types of thought: i.e. free conceptual generalizations (no matter how rigorous). But in the end of the video, even Hegel (a Leibniz ally in the larger view) calls the exactness of Leibniz’s metaphysics into question.

The common, tired reading of The Enlightenment as stemming from Empirical Anglo-American Scientific Views is called into question. Instead, it appears to be what Francis Yates called the Rosicrucian Enlightenment going back to Renaissance magic, hermeticism and the re-emergence of Platonism, Pythagoreanism and above all else: Gnosticism. The works of Professor Allison Coudert support this.

Check it out:

Part 22 is here! Ok, I previously have only released parts 1-3, 28…and now 22. As you can see they are completely out of order. But this is OK. Gary Geck videos are designed so that you don’t necessarily have to watch them in order. Afterall, the way the mind seems to work involves getting a loose and general view on things and gradually sharpening it over time. The videos can be watched this way: digested in non-sequential pieces that illuminate your understanding over time.

In this part, we begin our chapter on Kurt Gödel: his life, his mind and his philosophy…

I have completed this 25 minute lecture with words written by Kurt Gödel (but never delivered) with my animations and slides. It can now be delivered to the world.

And for those who find the music distracting, I have posted a version without music (but otherwise identical) here.

If you want more info on Kurt Gödel’s personal philosophy, I recommend Gödel’s Collected works and the works by Gödel’s close friend, Hao Wang:

Kurt Gödel has been called the greatest logician since Aristotle and A Genius at odds with the Zietgeist.  I have just released an mp3 of my reading of his 1961 (undelivered) lecture titled, “The Modern Development Of The Foundations Of Mathematics In The Light Of Philosophy”.

You can the link to open it in iTunes, etc. on my podcast page or access the mp3 directly below:

Full Kurt Gödel Lecture

It should become very clear that Gödel was a lone voice in his age of logical positivism, skepticism and analytical philosophy such as Harvard’s Dr. Willard Quine’s variety.  Quine of course called the higher reaches of Set Theory mere mathematical recreation, a view clearly at odds with Gödel’s.  According to Dr. Richard Tieszen of San Jose University, “The three philosophers Gödel found most congenial to his own way of thinking were Plato, Leibniz and Husserl.”  In fact Gödel saw much of Western Thought as being on the wrong path since it had strayed from the influence of Leibniz in the 18th Century.  It is surprising that Gödel promotes Kant (albeit in a modified form) with much enthusiasm in this lecture when Kant certainly helped to hasten the demise of Leibnizianism.  Kant once called Plato’s work ‘babble’.

Edit: Part 1 of 2 of the Video versions is now up here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64uF7rlD2jA

After months, Part 3 of my 42 part video series (revealing the mysteries of the universe) has finally been posted! …part 3 finally gets into the mind blowing mathematics mathematics of the meaning of life…and Grover from sesame street even shows up to help us count to infinity! As always it has HD 1080 viewing option…Here it is:

GaryGeck.com is not a political site. This is a rare political message from GaryGeck.com.  Even though politics and economics are vital to our fate as humans, it is a distraction from the mission of GaryGeck.com which goes to the very deep principles that might govern political decisions rather than focus on particulars.

The recent unspeakable disasters in Japan deserve as much attention as possible.  Our Japanese sisters and brothers need our help.  But some news organizations and sites (especially the ones that like to make news into gossip and Drudgery) have taken the disaster and used it for their own ratings-improving/anti-scientific/anti-nuke hysteria agenda.  George Monbiot of the Guardian has offered some perspective.  I recommend you read his article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima

Here is an except:

“Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.”

Please spread this article all around….don’t let hysteria rule the day….

If the human race doesn’t go all-out Nuclear as soon as possible, we are going to be in the dark for a long time…The disaster in Japan is beyond bad enough.  We don’t need an even bigger disaster (setbacks to the nuclear Renaissance)….such a setback would cost billions of potential lives over the next century.  Think Big.

Update: This podcast episode eplains the Fukushima situation as the experts see it.  This is must listen material for anyone who wants to see through the panic with a scientific eye: Listen Here.

-Gary Geck

www.LibriVox.org is one of the most important projects for the future of humanity.  You can volunteer to read a book (that has entered the public domain) and your recording will be preserved on the site’s servers for many generations.  It’s also backed up at archive.org and on thousands of user’s hard drives and mobile devices.

This is one of the few chances we have to make a difference educating future generations of humanity.  Put in the time to read the book out loud and people can listen while they lay in bed, jog, walk the dog or paint their bathrooms walls.  I’m working on a book on Leibniz (see podcast section).

Well, i have been waiting for this one to be completed for a while and it’s here!

Click Here to get The Life of Apollonius of Tyana !!!!  Some great volunteers have read the whole work!

Sadly, the only remaining historical “complete” record of Apollonius’s life is this work by Philostratus which references other, no longer extant, works on Apollonius.  This is must read/listen “secret knowledge”.  Of course this particular work won’t mean a whole lot until you dig into the larger field of Apollonius studies.  But it’s a great place to start.

This work is a rare glimpse into long lost ancient history and wisdom, and at the same time, propaganda by the sophist Philostratus.  Careful scholarship can extract the former from the latter.  Imagine how different history would have been had Philostratus’s propaganda project worked and the Roman Empire had remained “Apollonian” instead of the direction it went beginning with Constantine.

Philostratus worked for Julia Domna, the wife of emperor Septimius Severus.  Julia took her own life before Philostratus completed this work.

Julia Domna (170–217)

Check out the new GaryGeck.com official Teaser Trailer and overview of the 42-part Secret History Video Series:

Here it is…part 2 of my 42 part series revealing the mysteries of the universe. Remember to watch it in HD (Closed Captioning also available!).

This part gets into the philosophical implications of Cantor’s ideas. Plato, Aristotle, the Many and the One all come up! Stay tuned for part 3 where i begin to finally get into the mathematics, logic and Set Theory in depth… Mp3 version here.

OK, here it is. Part 1 of 42 of my YouTube series revealing the meaning of life! Part 1 introduces mathematician Georg Cantor as well as the story to come and a fascinating note on Abraham Robinson and some ‘forbidden knowledge’ your calculus teacher probably doesn’t even know:

Be sure to bump it up to full 1080p HD if your computer is fast enough. The meaning of life looks better in HD. Mp3 version here.