Markus Gabriel - Why The World Does Not Exist

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Well written and quite stimulating

This is a pretty demanding book.  It's written with wit and in a rather engaging style, but it's still a tough intellectual work-out.  On the whole I think it's worth the effort, but it's not an unmitigated intellectual treat by any means.

I am not a philosopher, although I have studied Philosophy of Science and it's an interest which I have kept up.  Markus Gabriel makes a decent stab at moving on from the sort of postmodern nonsense we've been subjected to of "our internal view of the world cannot be the world itself, so therefore (!) anyone's internal view is equally valid."  He does it with wit and verve and makes a decent case for his "New Realism."

It's not really for an amateur like me in a place like this to attempt to assess how valid Gabriel's ideas may be. However, with his admittedly slightly playful assertion that the title that the world as an entirety is not to be found within the world and therefore (!) cannot exist, he seems to me to be on some very thin philosophical ice.  Philosophers do like to play fast and loose with logical operators like "therefore" and "because" and Gabriel isn't immune from this.  For what it's worth, this just reads to me as a simple category error, like, "Here we have a pair of gloves.  However, the *pair* is not contained within the gloves, so therefore (!) the pair cannot exist."  The physical gloves and the concept of a pair are not of the same category, so this is plainly logical nonsense, and Gabriel seems to me to be making the same error about the world. I had a similar sense in a number of places, but it's reasonably cogent and sound enough to be stimulating rather than just infuriating.  (This is a considerable relief to someone who has actually read the whole of Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, for example.)

There is sometimes the slightly arrogant feel which seems to occur in a lot of philosophical writing where authors adopt an "if you don't agree then you're too stupid to understand" tone.  It's not as bad here as in some I've read, though, and at least the writing is largely comprehensible. 

I'd say this is well worth a go if you're interested in this sort of thing.  It is decently written, has some stimulating stuff in it and did make me think, which is, I suppose, what I'm looking for in a book like this.  I can recommend it on that basis.